


Begin Again

by sunryder



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Tony Stark, Gen, Kid Fic, Parent Tony Stark, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tony Stark Does What He Wants, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:26:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 50,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19130155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunryder/pseuds/sunryder
Summary: She tugged Tony against her body, the baby cradled between them. With her forehead pressed against his, she murmured a blessing. Tony felt like he was four again, going to Mass with his Nonna.“If you would save all creation, look beyond each single life. Let those who must fall, fall. Mourn the fading of each dead leaf but do not pause to stop it. Instead, create anew. Create out of ashes and death. Create out of darkness and chaos. That is how existence fought for life. Remake yourself, Anthony. And rise.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the quantumbang and I'm so excited I get to share it! This is the first story in what will hopefully be a massive series spanning all the way through Avengers, but right now it's just Tony getting a little love from the universe during Iron Man.
> 
> There's some beautiful art by [TheOtherWillow](http://quantumbang.org/artist-showcase-theotherwillow-for-begin-again/)
> 
> here at the Quantum Bang. Please go and make a fuss!

The castle was cold glass and dead concrete that sat upon the edge of a cliff like the old wizards’ towers. Though, there was something in the lines of it that hearkened to her own creation. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to go to some far distant world where plants were grown not of earth and water, but of rock and air.

She had come here to offer up her blessings in the old way, rewarding the righteous with the gift of her attention. For a lesser man, it would have been enough for her to pass through his halls unnoticed, leaving behind some slight measure of her touch that he could feel in the warmth of the sun or the color of a spring flower. But this one, he had earned more.

He had been called the Merchant of Death, and though the children of these times did not understand the eternal consequences of their actions, he had been a devout priest of death and destruction since he was little more than a boy. He did not know it, but fate had meant for him to be a sacrifice in that desert, few things being more powerful than the blood of the High Priest of Death, even as unwilling sacrifice. That death was to have brought about a war that would’ve lasted until the Destroyer of Worlds came to claim this place for his own. The Destroyer would have looked at the blood spilled upon this planet and decided there was no point in saving even half of creatures who could spread such wanton destruction among themselves.

But instead, Anthony Stark had survived and come out purified on the other side. The Merchant of Death had forsaken his god, had renounced his belief, and dedicated all his will to the preservation of life.

She did not approve the construction of a war machine to achieve such ends, but when Anthony claimed devotion to peace, she believed him, and such devotion deserved a better reward than just her presence. She intended to brush her skin over his sleeping eyes and gift him with good dreams that would raise him with courage to the morning light. But in the darkest part of the night, that space when the moon and all her creatures were at their zenith, she found Anthony standing in his kitchen, negotiating chopsticks through a carton of leftovers.

It shouldn’t have made her sad to see him there alone, so broken and tired. Human life had always been a fleeting thing, even those she blessed to be mightiest faded away so quickly they barely counted as more than snowflakes in June. But this boy, with his spine of steel and the heart of a star… she ached for him. She had endured all manner of wretched horrors at the hands of her tiny children, let them carry out abominations the likes of which her siblings could have scarcely dreamed. She had, quite nearly, stopped believing that they would do anything more than carry themselves screaming into the dark, ripping one another apart as they went. But in the darkest hour of this night, staring at a recent convert to the cause of life, she felt the brush of a cloak past her heels and she had hope.

While hope had once been her driving force, it was now so alien a feeling that she knew the man before her deserved more than just sweet dreams for rekindling it in her breast. Her presence was natural to all children of this world, so he did not ask any questions when she set the carton down on the counter and slipped into his arms.

Her altered plan intended a single, solitary kiss, gifting him some extra measure of will to protect his mind and body from the trials he had undergone and sustain him through what was to come. But one clever kiss from Anthony’s lips was all it took to decide that she would give him the oldest of blessings, the one she’d rewarded to the world’s greatest princes. She would let him inside her.

(She would, in fact, allow him in several times thanks to the months dear Anthony had been without a companion in his bed.)

It was partway through time number three that she decided Anthony deserved something more. Admittedly, she was inspired by the careful tilt of his hips as he drove up into her and the certain pressure of his finger against her clit as it caught against the callouses of his creation. She had grown accustomed to men lying beneath her and letting her take her fill, too overwhelmed to participate and petrified to be less than perfect. Anthony, however, laughed when she flipped him over and climbed on top, and somehow managed to check that she was comfortable before he sank back beneath the thrall of her magic. He was one of the best she’d ever had, and for a woman who had bedded a whole slew of gods and demigods, that was saying something. (Not that she’d ever tell the others that. Their fragile egos would start wars over such a thing.)

So, she braced her hands on his chest as she bounced atop him, placing her palms over the miniature star cradled betwixt his ribs. From one breath to the next the poison she could feel flooding his system was gone, the core of the star changed to something he was clever enough to recreate when the time came.

And that should have been blessing enough. When he finally collapsed in exhaustion she should have left, whether by the human legs she was wearing or dissolving onto the ocean breeze. Either way, she should not have stayed. But as she laid there in the strange empty light that came after the moon had descended but before the sun rose, she found herself in a world lit only by Anthony’s miniature star and she didn’t want to go.

No, she did not want to stay forever, bound to this body and this place. It took her a long moment to realize that the urge to remain was coming from the wholly unanticipated glow of potential life waiting to be sparked in her womb. There was enough fire in her Anthony that if she gave it place, she would catch with what he had left in her. She had not felt such potential in an age. And so she lay there and watched her beloved breathe beside her, his thumb idly tracing across the metal edge buried in his chest. The mere thought of another child was reckless and stupid, a red flag to the monsters in the far reaches of space that would invite them to come to this little world looking for blood. It was precisely the opposite of what she had come here to grant Anthony for his change of heart. He had put aside death and by this spark she would bring it down upon his head, a punishment for choosing life.

But then the first light of dawn broke over the wide expanse of land to the east of them, and the ocean out her beloved’s western window began to fade from the deep navy of night to the scarcest hint of protostar blue that glowed in his heart.

It was the light of her firstborn child breaking across the sky. She could feel his adoration seeping through the dawn. With that light and the icy breeze coming not from the closed window, all her doubts were scattered as together they bid her choose for herself. She had never quite decided to stop having children, and she wasn’t quite sure which of the children she had birthed had been her last, but now she would know. And this one, born to help usher in the age of heroes one last time, would be the last blessing she left on this world, a dawn to fight the oncoming dark.


	2. Chapter 2

It was the first time Tony had slept through the night since Afghanistan and he kind of wanted to stay in bed forever and cling to it, despite the stickiness on his thighs that meant he’d gotten drunk and worn himself out to earn the sleep. (Tony made it a rule to never engage in sex he had to pay for. But given his agoraphobic tendencies since he’d been back, he had the sinking sensation he’d broken that rule. He couldn’t imagine how expensive Pepper’s present would have to be for dealing with a morning-after prostitute.)

“J, you want to give me a heads up on who I had over last night?”

Instead of a snarky reply degrading Tony’s choice in disposable bed partners, there was silence.

“J?” Still nothing. Tony opened his eyes. “JARVIS, reply.” At the unprecedented quiet, Tony scrambled out of bed and into pants as he sprinted for his workshop, calling to JARVIS all the while.

See this? This was the reason Tony swore he’d never rely on a professional. When outside forces got to send someone to his house, there was no telling who might sneak into his systems.

Only, instead of being long gone like any good spy who had somehow managed to incapacitate the world’s only fully-functioning AI, last night’s bed partner was on the balcony outside Tony’s living room, just looking at the untouched line where ocean met sky. She was copper in the sunshine, with thick curls unbound and a white dress that made even the back of her look so breathtakingly beautiful that if she hadn’t screwed with JARVIS, Tony would have gone for another round right there on the stupid minimalist couch Pepper had picked out.

Tony stepped onto the balcony through the sliding windows that shouldn’t have been able to open without JARVIS there to direct them. “As much as I’d like to just keep staring at you, I’ve got a rule against people touching my AI.”

Then every single word that had been or ever might be slipped out of Tony’s head because the woman turned to face him with a baby in her arms.

“What… where… was the kid here the entire time?” Tony was horrified that he’d maintained an erection with a child in his house.

She smiled at him. “No. His life was kindled early this morning.”

“…OK.” Tony dragged the word out to several syllables, buying himself some time.

“I came here only to bless you with my touch, a reward for the choice you made to pursue life instead of death, but then you were too perfect not to bed.”

“Thanks for that.”

“No, thank you. I haven’t had such a splendid lover in a literal age. For men who seduced so many women you’d think the gods might have been better in bed. It speaks well of you that you don’t merely rely on your reputation.”

“That’s nice. Babies take months, not hours.” Tony couldn’t make himself placate the crazy lady any longer.

“Human babies, yes. This one is not entirely human. He is a product of my magic and your own fierce will.”

“And me being too drunk to use a condom, I’m guessing.”

“You were not drunk,” she snapped, and Tony quaked at the fury he felt burning beneath her skin. “I do not appreciate the implication that I took advantage of an unwilling participant.” It was like having a thunderstorm mad at you.

“That wasn’t my—look, you’re gorgeous, and I haven’t slept that well in pretty much ever so even if you were just standing here talking about gods and magic, I would still get your number and go again, but you’re standing there with a baby.”

“Take a deep breath and stop panicking for a moment, Anthony.” The woman meant that literally. She stared at Tony until he gave his most dramatic sigh. “Now, listen to what your heart is telling you about the child.”

“Are we having a Pocahontas moment right now?”

“ _Anthony_.”

“Yes, all right, I don’t need to do any deep breathing, I know! How in the hell do I know that he’s my kid and how in the hell did he happen? Biologically speaking I don’t think you should even be inseminated at this point!”

She smiled; his panic forgiven. The woman all but floated forward to press the baby into Tony’s chest and evolutionary biology kicked in. His shoulders seized up while he wrapped the tiny creature in his arms and tried to keep it from hitting the floor. She laughed and stepped behind him, winding her arms around his to reposition. She ran steady hands along Tony’s shoulders until they released, but Tony wasn’t really paying attention at that point. He was looking down at the bundle of life curled up in his arms, big brown eyes blinking open and hair sticking up like gravity hadn’t kicked in yet. The kid was a tiny little replica of Tony, like looking at one of the baby pictures that Ana Jarvis had made him swear never to harm.

“So, magic, huh?”

She circled in front of him, trailing her hands over his bare skin. “Magic. He is a gift that you have earned with your spirit, though not the one I intended to give you.”

She tugged Tony against her body, the baby cradled between them. With her forehead pressed against his, she murmured a blessing. Tony felt like he was four again, going to Mass with his Nonna. “If you would save all creation, look beyond each single life. Let those who must fall, fall. Mourn the fading of each dead leaf but do not pause to stop it. Instead, create anew. Create out of ashes and death. Create out of darkness and chaos. That is how existence fought for life. Remake yourself, Anthony. And rise.” He breathed in the words and felt strength in his weak lungs. She stepped back, dropping a soft kiss to the boy’s forehead as she faded into the morning light.

Tony blamed magic that it took him so long to realize the woman was just going to drift away on the breeze without even telling him the kid’s name. Tony demanded a noun, and she snapped back to a solid. Surprise finally made her look human. “The fathers have always named the children I gave them.”

“Well no offense to them, but that’s stupid. I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to my kid what in the hell happened this morning. I’m not going to tell him that his mother just dropped him off via magic and didn’t even care enough to name him.”

She studied the baby long and hard. Tony could almost see the wheels turning in her head. (Though, for magic people it was probably sorting through a rolodex of spells.) She reached out and brushed her hand over the emptiness above the child before she declared, “Call him Alexander.”

Tony nodded and that agreement earned him another deep kiss and then she was gone, no trace of her left other than the kid in his arms and the taste of rosemary on his lips. Pre-Afghanistan Tony would’ve been calling the cops right now, but apparently having a woman turn up in your house, sleep with you, and hand you a kid the next morning telling you it was yours was less stressful than waking up in a cave with a car battery attached to your heart. All a matter of perspective, Tony shrugged to himself.

And really, there was no denying the kid was his. Not just because it had big brown eyes that were going to give Tony a hell of a lot of problems saying no to later, but because he just  _knew_. Instincts were not scientifically supportable, so he’d still be getting a DNA test, but the kid was his. It was all kinds of impossible, but it was true.

“Sir, may I enquire where you obtained a newborn?”

Tony snorted. “Well, that explains some things.” The bundle didn’t like the sudden movement and Tony found himself bouncing along to the beat of a song to calm the kid back down.

“Sir?” JARVIS sounded nervous and Tony didn’t blame him.

“What do you think happened last night, J?”

“You left your workshop at 2:25 to eat leftover lo mein. After consuming seven bites you left the containers on the counter, idled in the living room for several minutes, then stumbled to bed. I chose not to inquire about your behavior because you were willingly electing to sleep. You woke up ten minutes ago, returned to the living room, stepped onto the balcony, and then a baby appeared in your arms. What do you believe happened last night, Sir?”

“The ‘idling’ was making out with a woman who turned up in the living room, and the going to bed was sex, J.”

“Sir, I do not believe the 18 hours you were awake before retiring yesterday were enough sleep deprivation to cause delusions.”

“Considering there’s a  _baby_  in my arms, I don’t think it was a delusion.”

“Human gestation generally takes 40 weeks, Sir. “

“Well, if she didn’t turn up on your cameras, somehow managed to convince me to have sex with her without me freaking out about the random woman in my house, all while keeping me from worrying that you weren’t interrupting the random lady, I’m pretty sure we might be dealing with something not human.” JARVIS’ silence conveyed his opinion on that. “When you’ve removed what’s possible, J.”

“Infant facial features are too generic for me to determine from the pictures I have on file whether or not the child is yours simply from aesthetics.”

“Get a rush on a DNA test, J. And keep it quiet. But unless the kid turns out to evolve into a squid monster or something…”

“I see. And might I inquire as to Young Sir’s name?”

“JARVIS, this is Alexander. Lex, this is JARVIS. He runs our lives. And I’ve just got to say, little guy, that’s a shitty name your mom stuck you with. I don’t know if she thought about how stupid it would be to name a Stark after a supervillain. We’re actually kind of trying to rebrand right now and that’s not going to help.”

“If I may, Sir.” On the big screen that was Tony’s living room windows, JARVIS pulled up what Tony guessed was a baby naming website.

“J, we’ve really got to talk about the shit you look at on the Internet.”

“If I may point out Sir, you are the one who introduced me to pornography. The study of nomenclature hardly compares.”

“Point.” And right there was ‘Alexander,’ apparently Greek for ‘defender of men’ according to these people who didn’t have any kind of citations or footnotes. “Doesn’t it seem kind of 20-something starlet who accidentally got knocked up?”

“Forgive me, Sir. I assumed that was where we were going to pretend Little Sir came from. The non-traditional spelling will perhaps remove some of the supervillain and world-conquering connotations you are anxious to avoid.”

“We could middle name him Alexander. Keep with tradition and give him my middle name as a first name because we Starks are nothing if not egomaniacs. Edward Alexander Stark, how do you feel about that, kid?” The bundle of squishy features and big eyes didn’t seem to have an opinion. He just looked up at Tony with a little furrow that maybe meant the boy was thinking about being hungry. Or maybe that was how babies disagreed with their names? Who the hell knew? “Holy shit, you are tiny.”

“Language.” JARVIS chided.

“So long as I don’t swear in front of Pepper and he doesn’t swear in front of reporters, we’re fine.”

“I believe that the requirement is that your son is certain you are not swearing  _at him_.”

Tony swallowed the urge to panic a bit and told JARVIS to download the top ten baby parenting books according to overall rating. “And none of that flashy stuff that in six months a reputable psychiatrist is going to say will screw the kid the hell up.”

JARVIS agreed and out of the corner of his eye Tony could see a proposed purchase list of necessary newborn items appearing on the screen. Neither one of them had any experience with children, so while JARVIS would normally just go ahead and buy whatever popped into his processors when they were building bombs in the basement, baby books and diapers were the kind of thing he wanted human approval for. Human in this case being Pepper. Though Pepper didn’t have any kids, and neither did Happy, so there was a good chance they were going to have a very awkward phone call with Mama Rhodes about what kind of shit you needed to not kill a baby in the first three hours.

With all the care he could possibly manage – which really wasn’t a lot for a man who generally dealt with metal, just another thing he didn’t know how to do – Tony set the baby down in the crack between sofa cushions. Then he dropped to the floor and put his head between his knees for an old-fashioned breakdown. He pressed sweaty hands to the glass of his arc creator and tried to tell himself it was humming along in there just fine, it didn’t matter that it felt like it was expanding in his chest, crushing his lungs and shoving apart his ribs.

But Tony couldn’t even panic properly, because there was a baby squawking about how it really hated this couch thing and could Tony just pick him back up? Tony started to dry heave at the thought of the kid sitting there, reliant and waiting on Tony’s incompetent care.

“Please breathe, Sir.” JARVIS’ unnerved voice broke through the haze. Tony was sure that he’d only been sitting there a moment, but based on the screeching coming from his son, he’d gotten a little lost during his mental reboot.

Tony forced himself up onto his knees to see the wailing kid and paused. “Sir?” The poor AI sounded so confused.

“Yeah J, he’s bigger.” And he was. Substantially. Sure, he was still a baby with the squishy face and the gravity-defying hair, but he’d filled out a bit, like Tony had been feeding him every hour, on the hour, for a month. Tony scooped the kid up and he felt sturdier too, like he wasn’t going to just slip though Tony’s arms because he was nothing but bone and skin.

“According to various medical websites he appears to have gone from newborn to approximately three months.”

“I think this is another point in the not human column, J.”

“I must agree, Sir. Though his aging has not been gradual since he first appeared on my sensors. It was sudden after his crying began in earnest.”

“You think he was trying to get big enough to get off the couch? Or just every time he loses his temper, he’s going to get older?”

“I lack sufficient data to say for sure, but neither seems accurate given he is still crying and hasn’t grown at all.”

Tony got his shit together enough to bounce a little bit like he’d seen people do in movies. And really, Tony shouldn’t think that unnaturally stern little glower was great.

And that was it. This was so unbelievably stupid, and he really wasn’t the sort of man who should be anybody’s father, but Tony was keeping him.

“Alexander then. Alexander Carbonell Stark. The name doesn’t really give you anything to hide behind, because no one is going to call you Carbonell like they would’ve called you Eddie but hiding doesn’t really work out for us anyway. And maybe a bit of your grandmother’s family in there will balance out the Stark shittiness. And it’s going to suck, I’ve got to warn you about that. I have no idea why your mom picked me to have the magical baby, maybe because money means I’ll be able to hide you, but it was a stupid choice on her part. But here’s the thing kid, I’ll try. And that’s all I can offer.”

The tiny little thing grabbed Tony’s finger and he took that as agreement. “All right then. I was about to say that it’s you and me kid, but I think this is one of those times to call for backup. J, call the source code.”

“You know that my other self detests being referred to in a binary manner, Sir.”

“Well, I think today he’s going to have other things to worry about.”

Tony’s internal clock meant that usually he was calling Jarvis the human in the middle of California’s night and bright and early in England. Tony honestly didn’t really know what Jarvis did in the afternoon, despite his protests that he didn’t have anything keeping him in Kent when Tony was alone in his massive house in Malibu. If Tony had breathed that he wanted Jarvis with him, the old man would’ve been on a plane before Tony could take it back. But Tony hadn’t, and Jarvis respected Tony’s wishes enough that, however much it would have soothed both of them, Jarvis stayed in England.

Tony kind of wished that he’d waited to call Jarvis until he had things under control since few things in the world made Tony feel so small as Edwin Jarvis answering a video call with, “Anthony, what’s wrong? Please tell me you went to bed last night.”

Tony desperately wanted to make a joke about how he did, but not for sleeping. That didn’t really feel right with his kid in hearing range. Who knew what kind of stuff his little, rapidly-aging, non-human brain might be soaking up? Instead, Tony bit his lip and tilted his bundle as much as he could without starting to panic that he might drop him. JARVIS was a champ and pulled up a split screen with an image from the camera above him so Jarvis could get a clear shot of Alexander’s face.

Jarvis’ “Oh dear,” said pretty much everything.

“So, this is Alexander. He’s my son. Alexander, meet Jarvis, he’s our favorite person who isn’t made of code. We like him so much we turned him into code.”

Jarvis stared at the Stark boys the same way he had when Tony showed him his first computer. “JARVIS, call Miss Potts and get her to the house right now for whatever legal paperwork Anthony will need and charter a flight for me. I’ll be at the airport in two hours.”

“If I may, Mr. Jarvis, a helicopter can be on your lawn in twenty minutes to take you to the airport. That will give you some time to pack and make any necessary arrangements.”

“Yes please, JARVIS. And tell Miss Potts that if she feels the need for further instructions, I will have the phone Tony gave me so she will be able to contact me on the plane. Though I imagine she’ll have the sense to order in some diapers and other essentials.”

“I have shifted over one of the dummy accounts to conceal the purchases, Other Self.”

Jarvis was running around the background of the screen, already gathering up stuff that probably weren’t part of the regular packing scheme. Some of them were books, so Tony figured sentimentality was playing a bigger role than just throwing together a go bag.

“You know I can buy you stuff when you get here, right Jarvis? You don’t need to—”

“You haven’t packed for yourself since the last time you tried to run away from home Anthony. I do believe that bag consisted of nothing but computer parts and candy bars. Leave the luggage to me.”

“OK, but I’m just saying—”

“Anthony.”

“Yes, Jarvis.”

Jarvis scampered out of frame then backed right into it to say, “This, of course, in no way means that I am not thrilled to meet your son.”

“Well, you should be, grandpa.” And what do you know, that blush of Jarvis’ was almost as great as the sight of Lex’s face.


	3. Chapter 3

Tony had heard people refer to a dirty room looking like a bomb had gone off. Before he’d been in a real bomb blast and felt the blood draining out of him to water the sand, he’d have considered it pretty accurate since small bombs had gone off in his lab plenty of times, scattering debris everywhere.

Though, maybe being dirty was more like a test bomb going awry than actual bomb. Which really wasn’t a turn of phrase that was going to get picked up in common usage, but Tony was trying hard not to think too much about the diaper packs spread around his lab like shrapnel. (Used diapers, however, should be treated very much like unexploded ordinance.)

JARVIS could set up all the dummy accounts he wanted for the purchase of diapers (“Sizes 1-3 in preparation for any sudden changes of age and size.”), onsies (“They appear to follow no standard sizing system, just generic numbering based upon the child’s age.”), and formula (“Given your own nebulous relationship with food, Sir, I have taken the liberty of ordering what mommyblog.com refers to as ‘the sample pack.’”). The problem was this stuff somehow had to get from the store (“Costco, Sir. The false identity is now a member of Costco.”) to Tony’s lab. Baby stuff wasn’t like the usual raw building materials they had delivered to the front door, and they couldn’t have Happy go and pick it all up. (Tony couldn’t imagine the field day the press would have when Tony Stark’s driver got caught with a cart full of diapers in various sizes.)

Tony was going to have stuff start falling off the back of a truck and donate the rest of the shipment to shelters or something when JARVIS pointed out those arrangements took a few days and Young Sir had already soiled the t-shirt wrapped around his waist.

“Well  _I_ can’t go get them, J! I don’t even know how Costco works!”

JARVIS, beloved JARVIS, said that his Other Self recommended Sir sit down on the couch and watch a few more YouTube videos about childcare (thank goodness for children’s hospitals and their professional opinions on the matter). JARVIS would take care of it.

And, of course, Tony’s former youngest child did. He may have used the same guys who delivered Tony’s weed and paid them from the cash stash set aside for illegal things, but they did it. Apparently rush grocery delivery included the fundamentals of baby life, as well as a brown box taped shut so the potheads couldn’t look. Even if they would’ve been tempted to ask questions about what they were dropping off at Tony’s guard shed, the teenager wearing the grocery store t-shirt who handed them their package soothed any worries.

The worst part of the whole process turned out to be Tony leaving the house for the minute it took to speed down the driveway, grab the box, and reverse back to his garage. (He told JARVIS to modify the armor’s fabrication schedule to account for Lex’s development. The YouTube videos told him the kid would need naps and Tony could fit a whole lot of engineering in during that time.)

All in all, JARVIS got a week’s worth of baby stuff to the house in just under an hour, which gave Lex the chance to only soil one more t-shirt.

In the meantime, U followed Tony across the lab, recording every moment of Lex’s life like all she needed was more data and suddenly the tiny human would make sense. DUM-E ran around using his claw to try and clean up like the kid was going to leap out of Tony’s arms and put something not ‘bot approved in his mouth. Butterfingers tried and failed to tidy in DUM-E’s wake. Tony worked on the concept of gentle with them since they all loved stopping mid-task to poke their baby brother.

Tony really couldn’t blame them. He’d started his JAVIS-mandated relaxation with Lex leaned back against his chest as they both sprawled on the couch, but the back of Lex’s tiny head pressed against the arc reactor and Tony didn’t like that he couldn’t see his son’s face. They tried a couple of variations – half of which were suggested by ‘bots that didn’t really understand human bodies. Tony ended up back at his workstation with Lex tucked in the crook of his left elbow. (Lex objected to the right. Tony couldn’t figure out why.)

With their new baby stuff, Tony changed, clothed, fed, and burped Lex – while JARIVS read the instructions aloud, just to make sure he wasn’t going to bruise his kid on that last step. Then he re-clothed Lex after breakfast came right back up. (JARVIS made a note in the growing spreadsheet but, like most experiments, the kid would have to spit up several more times before they knew if it was temperature, speed, bottle, delivery angle, or the type of formula itself.)

As soon as Lex fell asleep in Tony’s arms, JARVIS convinced him to hop into the decontamination shower. Lex was relocated to a couch cushion on the floor – which was surrounded by more couch cushions, just in case. (Neither Tony nor JARVIS trusted themselves enough to start buying baby furniture without Jarvis.) The ‘bots swore on their spark plugs not to poke Lex while Tony was occupied, and they were so obedient Tony actually intended to leave JARVIS’ watchful eye on Lex while he darted upstairs to grab some more protein bars to restock his supply. Things hadn’t been chaos for a whole hour and Tony was starting to think he had the hang of this baby thing, which meant that was the moment JARVIS warned him Mr. Stane had just put in his code at the front gate.

“Lock it down.”

“The entire house, Sir?”

“Yes. No. Fuck.” Tony’s brain sputtered to catch up to his instincts. It was Obie, but Obie wasn’t Jarvis. Pep and Happy didn’t even know about Lex yet and they were higher up on the kid list. Obie was batting for Tony against the Board, but even he would freak out when he found out about a baby. Obie had given Tony the condom lecture because children distracted you from making money. Right now, unplanned fatherhood in his 40s would be a convincing argument that Tony shouldn’t be in charge of anything, whether that be kid or company.

But Tony couldn’t just lock Obie out. He was Tony’s godfather. When he found out about Lex, he was going to be that aloof grandfather who gave up on real presents and just gave Lex cash every Christmas.

“Sir?”

“Open the house but lock down the lab, J. Keep the ‘bots from hurting Lex and if he wakes up…”

“I shall manufacture a phone call or the completion of an experiment, Sir.”

Tony darted up the stairs. “Not an experiment. We can keep Obie out of the lab, but we can’t keep him from walking down the stairs to see what I’m working on.”

“You could shove him down the stairs and claim that any sight of Young Sir was a delusion brought on by head trauma.”

“Let’s call that Plan B.”

Tony grabbed the protein bars he’d originally come upstairs for, made it two steps away from the cupboard, then shunted them all into a drawer with hot sauce packets. Protein bars meant engineering binge, engineering meant lab, and Obie in the lab was bad. Tony heard the front door sliding open and grabbed something from the fridge. It was an orange. Tony shoved that right back in because nothing was more suspicious than him eating unsolicited fruit. Obie roamed into the kitchen to find Tony in an argument with JARVIS about the value of leftovers.

“Really, Sir. I do not believe the amount of MSG will make those noodles safe for consumption.”

“You’re going to need something stronger than day old noodles, Tony.” Obie interrupted.

“I think JARVIS might tell you there’s nothing stronger than day old noodles. And hello to you too, Obie.” Tony came out of the fridge with the objectionable takeout. (He’d been eating it when Lex’s mom had turned up, and some crazy part of Tony thought it might help him protect her son.) “What’s up?”

Obie tossed a stack of paper across the counter.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a Preliminary Injunction, Tony.”

“What?” Tony wiped his hands on his tank top and picked up the papers.

“A Preliminary Injunction. The rest of the Board showed it to me last night and wanted to file it immediately. I convinced them to give me a chance to talk it over with you before they did something they couldn’t take back.”

“J?”

“A Preliminary Injunction is designed to preserve the status quo of a corporation and prevent potential further damage while a lawsuit is being carried out.”

“Meaning those bastards are going to sue me.”

“They want SI back to making weapons.” Obie answered.

“I’m the majority shareholder of SI, the CEO, and the CTO. What in the hell is their argument against me?

“Breach of fiduciary duty.” Tony snorted. “No, Tony, they’re not wrong. You have a professional duty to put the interests of SI above your own, and they should have no problem convincing a judge that right now you’re not doing that.” Obie sat down on one of the kitchen stools. Tony didn’t offer him a drink.

“I’m putting SI’s future ahead of current profits!”

“Those are nice words, Tony, but they don’t really compete with the damaging numbers the Board has as proof. They’re arguing that you’re not only breaching your financial duty to the shareholders, but also that you’re acting irrationally in what you believe to be your own self-interest.”

“My self-interest? It’s in the world’s interest!”

“The Board doesn’t really care about the world’s interest, Tony.”

“If I’m such a risk to the company then why did you talk them into holding off?”

“Don’t be like that, kid. You know I’m in your corner.”

“Yeah.” Tony sighed.

“And you know why I was able to hold them off. Because as terrified as they are, you’re still Tony Stark. Your brain makes SI. It wasn’t that difficult to convince them it wasn’t worth alienating the golden goose when he could still be reasoned with.”

Tony’s eyes snapped up. “We’re not making weapons again, Obie.”

“I’m not telling you to. But you’ve got to understand where they’re coming from. The stock has dipped almost 60 points. You keep saying no to weapons but you haven’t provided anyone with an alternative. We don’t have a plan. You’ve got to give me something to pitch them if you want them to stay on board.”

“I told you already, we’re going to diversify!”

“What does that mean, Tony?”

“Clean energy, personal electronics—”

“Clean energy hardly makes any profit and requires all kinds of governmental permission, which we won’t get when the government is pissed at us for leaving them undersupplied in weapons. That little arc reactor in your chest is beautiful, Tony, but you haven’t told me what you want to do with it and any time I suggest mass production or integration, you shut me down. And don’t even get me started on personal electronics. That division is so cutthroat that if you try and break in, Apple will have you murdered in your sleep.”

“Better them than terrorists.”

“Some people could argue that’s a fine line.” Tony rolled his eyes and put his leftovers back in the fridge. “A new cell phone isn’t going to help you sleep better at night, Tony.”

“J, what will they have to prove to the judge to get their injunction?”

“That they and other investors will suffer irreparable harm if the Motion for Injunctive Relief is not granted.”

“Which is true.” Stane interrupted. “The Board and everyone with SI stock are losing money like its 1929.”

“A Preliminary Injunction also requires proof that their case is either likely to succeed on its merits when the matter goes to trial, or that the solution to the case is not obvious and the Board is suffering the greater balance of hardship while matters are determined.”

“Hardship? They think waiting for me to invent a new direction for the company is a hardship?”

“It’s a hardship for your brain and hardship for the rest of us on the wallet. The wallet is the one a judge can measure.”

Tony turned on Obie. “Rest of us?”

“You’re not the only one with a massive share of SI stock, Tony. I’ve taken a hit too.”

“So you agree with them?”

“Hey, hey.” Obie stood up and raised his hands just the same way he always used to step in between Howard and Tony when they were about to come to blows. “I’m on your side, Tony. I’m always on your side. If you want to diversify, then we’ll diversify. But maybe shutting down weapons manufacturing entirely isn’t the way to go.”

“Obie—”

“No, Tony. Just  _listen_  to me for a second.” Obie got in Tony’s space, looming down over him like he was still a kid that needed secrets whispered to him. “We’ve been bailing out of contracts on your order, and you don’t want US soldiers left high and dry because we cut them off, do you?” Tony hesitated. “Do you?”

“No.”

“And you don’t want all those SI employees at our manufacturing plants to be without jobs, do you?”

“They’ll be transferred!”

“Building bomb components isn’t the same thing as making a phone and you know that. We’ve got employees all over the world, engineers, scientists, all trained in weapons manufacturing. Even if you stick with your grand idea of retraining all those people or paying them until they find new work, that plan would go better if you did it in stages. I know you’re not a step at a time sort of guy, Tony, and that’s part of what I love about you.” He propped his arm on Tony’s shoulder and dragged him close. “Let me be the businessman and say that if we do this in stages, the transition will be smoother. It’ll take time, but everyone will calm down a little and no one will be crushed under the forward progress. People won’t lose their jobs, we can figure out what government contracts you want to keep and which you don’t, what weapons you can live with and which you can’t, and maybe you can have a chance to breathe, Tony.”

Tony shrugged off Obie’s touch. “I’m breathing fine.”

“Are you? Because someone informed me that Edwin Jarvis got a plane yesterday, headed for Malibu.”

Tony backed away. “Are you stalking Jarvis?”

“I employ someone at his retirement home to warn me if anyone tries take advantage of Edwin. He was my friend.” Obie sounded like that was perfectly reasonable and Tony was the one overreacting.

“You mean you’re trying to head off corporate espionage.”

“Isn’t that what I just said? Either way, a helicopter turned up for Edwin yesterday to take him to a private plane chartered for Malibu. He should be landing any time.”

“What’s your point?”

“Tony, you felt the need to call your babysitter home to help you. That means something is wrong.”

“Don’t talk about Jarvis like that.”

“Tony—”

“No, Obie. You need to leave.” Tony stormed past him and waved him toward the front door. Obie followed him and ignored the order.

“Tony, if I walk out of here without a deal, the Board is filing this Injunction. With that comes a lawsuit that strips SI from your control. You’ll lose any power you have to stop weapons production. I’ll do my best to get you what you want, but I don’t think you know what you want. If you just rescind your order to stop weapons production, you can take a day off, figure out how you want things to turn out, and then we can push forward your vision in a reasonable way. You won’t have to break yourself down because you’ve got who knows how many employees, soldiers, civilians, and billions of dollars resting on your shoulders. You can be smart about this, Tony. Let me help you be smart about this.”

Tony didn’t know if he would’ve let himself be talked back if Jarvis really had been on a plane to help Tony from getting crushed under the weight of his own ambition, like Obie thought. He also didn’t know if Obie would’ve turned up in his kitchen to help without warning that Jarvis was on a plane. But he did know that there was a kid downstairs, probably already awake and playing with his older brothers.

Tony could picture what was coming next if he listened to Obie. He’d resume weapons manufacturing again just to smooth the transition. But it was early days, so Tony would hold a hard line. He’d cut the bombs and the bombers, and the research division that made things straight out of a dystopian novel. But Tony would get stonewalled at the guns, and then suddenly some Hammer bomb would go off prematurely, killing soldiers like the ones who’d been gunned down beside Tony. Then it would be: just tell us what’s wrong with the other guy’s bomb so this doesn’t happen again. And then would come the: why don’t you just do that fix for all these bombs? And then, and then, and then.

Suddenly Tony’s kid would be 15, going through all the shit he could find about his father on the Internet and asking Tony why he’d stopped weapons manufacturing if he was just going to start it up again a year later.

Or worse, Tony would approve the weapons manufacturing today only to wake up tomorrow and discover Lex had been nothing more than a dream. He would reach out for his son only to find the mother had taken him back because Tony had relapsed into warmongering. Obie’s argument was good, but it didn’t stand up to the kid downstairs.

“You know, that’s all practical Obie, if I didn’t think the Board would find a back door. I can’t give ground. If I take a moment to say I’m tired or admit maybe I could make something less bloody for the military, they’ll stomp over the top of me and things will go back to how they were. I can’t do that again.”

Obie sighed and pressed his palms to Tony’s cheeks. “Well then, kid. I warn you now: they’re going to make you pay.”


	4. Chapter 4

Edwin couldn’t imagine what foolishness had possessed him to believe Master Anthony would listen when he told him to immediately get Miss Potts to the house so she could offer aide. For all that the young lady had no children of her own – and Edwin had long ago learned the perils of assuming maternal instincts in any woman – Miss Potts was first and foremost a problem solver. She had the rare gift to retain a level head no matter the circumstances. Since these were circumstances Anthony could not build his way out of, Miss Potts’ advice would be crucial.

Genetic tests needed to be conducted, maternal rights needed to be forfeited, ironclad non-disclosures needed to be written and signed to prevent future dramatics, and temporary custody needed to be arranged in case a judge wanted to make a fuss about a baby being dropped in Anthony’s lap. There needed to be an order of custody keeping Alexander with people who loved him should Anthony get swept away by the government for further questioning. They needed research into the meaning of competency in case someone got snippy about Anthony’s PTSD. Heaven forbid the device in Anthony’s chest began to fail or terrorists succeeded in their quest, but a line of succession needed to be established, both for Alexander and for Stark Industries. The thought of both child and company being turned over to Obadiah Stane once again was Edwin’s worst nightmare come to life.

All of these practicalities had to be seen to and were things about which Anthony would never think to ask. He was accustomed to the world rearranging itself to suit his will, and rarely did the legal system work that way. Dear JARVIS, for all he grew more like a person every time Edwin spoke to him, would either not know these things were required, or he would lack the physical form necessary to file paperwork.

Edwin spent the entire flight occupied with making lists of all the things that must be done – and not asking how in the world JARVIS was marking down his accomplishment of those listed goals when the tablet was not connected to the airplane’s internet. Edwin forced himself into several naps in between the walks about the cabin that his cardiologist recommended for international travel. London to California was just over 11 hours, thankfully with no waiting for the next available commercial flight when Tony Stark’s name was being thrown about. For all that Edwin was prepared to stay awake for a few hours more so Anthony could get a bit of sleep, Edwin was not prepared for the startled Mr. Hogan who met him outside LAX.

Edwin assured Mr. Hogan that he was in perfect health, which only frustrated the poor man since he had been sent out by JARVIS to pick up the elderly butler. Anthony had not been answering all day, which was odd neither before nor after Afghanistan, but JARVIS had locked them out, which was. “I called Pepper right after JARVIS sent me to the airport. We both figured something was up on your end and the Boss had gone into lockdown mode to freak out about it, but if you’re fine…”

Jarvises, human and code, did not fume, no matter how they were tempted to by the behavior of the Stark in their charge. “I am quite well, I assure you, Mr. Hogan. And to quell your fears, Master Stark is fine. Though perhaps he will not be when I get done with him. Would it be more efficient for us to pick up Miss Potts from her office on our way to Anthony or to have her driver bring her along?”

Mr. Hogan didn’t startle and declared her driver would be best, especially at this time of night. Without requiring a follow-up question, Mr. Hogan read Edwin’s tone perfectly and called Miss Potts to tell her they’d be with Tony in an hour and maybe she should meet them at the mansion.

Miss Potts sighed in relief and said she’d be a bit behind their arrival because of paperwork, but she wouldn’t be long. “Can you tell us anything about what’s going on, Mr. Jarvis?”

“I believe it would be better coming from Master Anthony, Miss Potts.”

“I cannot imagine any information in the world that wouldn’t be better delivered by you, Mr. Jarvis.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Miss Potts.”

Edwin held that belief close to his heart as they arrived at Anthony’s door. Edwin took a moment’s comfort from the main rooms of the house appearing just as photogenic as ever, but there were not enough contents in the house to scatter anyplace, even on Anthony’s worst day.

“Sir is the workshop, Mr. Jarvis,” JARVIS murmured. “He fell asleep an hour ago.”

Edwin shucked off his coat and began rolling up his sleeves as he went. Mr. Hogan followed, leaving behind Edwin’s luggage and not even pretending to peel away and deliver it to a bedroom. “Just him?”

“No. The… other party fell asleep an hour and half ago, insofar as I am able to tell.”

Edwin’s progress down the stairs was slow, and he paid no attention to the way Mr. Hogan hovered as though Edwin has going to tumble down the stairs face first. (He’d given up pride on this matter after his 90th birthday.) Edwin froze on the stairs at his first glimpse of Anthony’s lab post-child and the fussing went right out of his head as his brain stalled at the cognitive dissonance. The workshop had always been in some state of chaos which Anthony’s brain considered perfect order. Even as a small child with a butler Anthony had managed bedlam. But the numerous tables grouped around the lab entrance had been… tidied. There was no better word for it. Papers were stacked in squared off piles, pencils and pens were in clean coffee cups, spare screws and bits of metal had been catalogued according to size and type and then arranged in a series of clear drawers Edwin had never seen before. The spare projects that were usually scattered over every spare surface had been gathered on one table and covered in a dust-proof drop cloth that was weighted down in case of a sudden, impossible breeze.

Tony’s circular desk where he did his designing had been divided into thirds by lines of electrical tape. The first third was lined with boxes of diapers in assorted sizes, the second had a mountain of white onesies, while the last held rows of empty bottles, a line of different powdered formula types, and an electric kettle with a Fahrenheit temperature monitor.

Above each section floated one of Anthony’s holographic interfaces containing some sort of chart. Edwin was almost certain that the only display he could see clearly from the stairs held weights for Alexander and corresponding diaper sizes, but there was no chance a child so new could be out of newborn diapers like the black line through the word suggested.

Edwin approached the table and found that the second display was much simpler, holding a three-column chart listing the sizes and how many onesies were clean or dirty. His analysis was only supported by Butterfingers beeping hello as he went past with a bucket of freshly laundered onesies to add to the already voluminous stack. (Edwin couldn’t even begin to understand the data being run on the next display about the food.)

In truth, the most disorganized part of the workshop was now Anthony himself, sprawled against a pile of pillows on the sofa in his lab’s little lounge area. Edwin couldn’t tell if the pile had collapsed as Tony sunk into sleep or if the ‘bots had added them afterwards. Alexander was in nothing but his diaper, sprawled against Anthony’s bare chest with his cheek pressed to the arc reactor.

The moment was broken by Mr. Hogan’s breathy curse. “Holy fuck.” Tony shot up at the nearly silent human disruption to his mechanical empire and the whole world froze, waiting for the baby to start screaming. Instead, Alexander just gave a gummy grumble and settled back against Tony’s chest. They all sighed in relief.

After a few dazed blinks Tony seemed to realize the humans weren’t a figment of his imagination. “Thank fuck you’re here, J.”

“No cursing in front of your son, Anthony.”

“That’s what other you said.”

“And what did you say?”

“So long as he knows I’m not cursing at him, I’m calling it good.”

Edwin didn’t snort, but it was a close call. Instead, he hefted the sturdy child from his father’s arms and started issuing orders. “To the shower with you, Anthony. Miss Potts is on her way to handle the documents and preparations I recommended when you first called me twelve hours ago and now must be started before any of us can get some sleep. Mr. Hogan, my bag to my room please. Other Self, if you could explain your charts and limited supply of baby materials to me, I would appreciate it.”

Edwin did not take his eyes off the babe in his arms the entire time he spoke and it took him longer to realize than he wanted to admit that Alexander, in fact, would no longer fit in newborn diapers. Plane flights only  _felt_  months long, so Edwin opened his mouth to ask how the child had grown so much in the space of a few hours. The part of his brain forged by industrial espionage and spy activities kicked back on before he said something in front of even so trusted a source as Mr. Hogan. “After we are all laundered and Master Anthony has fully rejoined the land of the conscious, we will have the conversation that all of us are so anxious to have.”

Tony managed to regain his feet but hesitated for a long moment before Edwin nudged him on his way. “I am sure that my other self has a thorough feeding and changing schedule that he will tell me all about so I don’t miss anything.”

“You just got off an international flight, J. And I showered—when did I shower J?”

“Ten hours ago, Sir.”

Edwin wanted to ask how Anthony had managed that, but didn’t. “Either way, you have just spent at least thirteen hours alone with a baby. Whether it be coffee or another shower which, if I recall correctly, is probably necessary no matter when your last shower was, take a few minutes.”

Edwin had two lectures prepared, one to lure Anthony out of emulating Howard Stark’s ambivalence and the other calming Anthony back to moderation in his desire to parent the boy in a way that might fix his own childhood. However, to Edwin’s glorious surprise, Anthony nodded his agreement. He dropped one kiss to Alexander’s forehead and another to Edwin’s temple while he murmured thanks for getting here so quickly.

Mr. Hogan followed Anthony up the stairs in a daze. Edwin cleared his throat and asked JARVIS to warn them if it looked as though Anthony was going to fall asleep while standing. Edwin resigned himself to the little burrow Anthony had created in his workshop and shoved off a few pillows before settling on the couch. He ought to be asking JARVIS all sorts of questions, but he found it quite impossible to take his eyes off the child before him.

The passage of time seemed to have no meaning with this tiny replica of Anthony in his arms, blinking open eyes far more serious than should exist on so small a face. Edwin could not articulate his gratitude at being granted this sight before he died. It had taken all his will to negotiate house without wobbling and he was so exhausted from the effort to get here that he could have slept for days, but it was worth it. Anthony had a child. He would not do as his father had done and sink into alcoholism and rage, he would rise, as he always had done.

It felt like mere breaths later that Anthony came back downstairs in clean clothes and visibly had to restrain himself from taking the child back in his arms as though he was concerned the boy might be nothing but a figment of his imagination. Instead, he settled more softly down next to Edwin than he had ever managed on his own mother’s fine furniture. “Edwin Jarvis, this is Alexander Carbonell Stark. Alexander, this is Grandpa Jarvis. I know I introduced you guys earlier, but JARVIS and I have since discovered that babies can’t see what’s going on with screens, so this is the first time he’s seen your face.”

Edwin let the babe wrap his fist around one finger and gave him a little shake hello before the boy dragged his fist – Edwin’s finger and all – to his mouth and started to gnaw.

“J has made a list of binkies for L to try. We didn’t want to risk another delivery of baby stuff in the same day but we’ve got stuff piling up at a fake apartment for Happy to pick up. According to JARVIS’ research there are a bunch of different kinds of binkies and some babies care about that kind of crap.”

“Is that why there are so many varieties of diapers?”

Tony hesitated just a beat too long before he said, “Yeah, partly.”

“Were you hoping that my vision had failed me so much I wouldn’t realize that your child has aged significantly since this morning?”

“No. I was hoping you wouldn’t ask since J and I don’t really have an answer for that yet beyond  _magic_.”

Edwin ripped his eyes away from Alexander, but the sharp heels of Miss Potts on the stairs interrupted his questions. Mr. Hogan had to have warned her, because there was no one on the planet, even someone so steady as Ms. Potts, who would respond to Tony Stark’s child so calmly. Even with warning and Mr. Hogan’s hand on her shoulder, Ms. Potts still had to smooth the shock off her face, as though she’d thought Mr. Hogan’s report had to be mistaken. It was remarkable how the lady didn’t even need to speak for Edwin to know she had decided that if Anthony was going to parent, he was going to be the best one she could help him be.

“Right.” Pepper gave a brisk little nod. “I assume JARVIS is already on research.”

“I have compiled a list of the most credible books on parenting,” JARVIS replied.

“We’re going to actually need to talk to someone who’s raised a child. I don’t think this is one of those things we can figure out from books and we can’t run experiments like you two usually do.”

“Considering the charts they already have for diaper sizes, I’m sure they’ve found a way to integrate experiments.” Edwin teased.

“Sizing for diapers varies from company to company and is based upon a child’s weight rather than their waist measurement. That is not sufficient information to determine fit. We needed samples.”

“You tell ‘em, J. Everything can be an experiment. And anything that isn’t, that’s what Jarvis is for.”

“While I am honored and can be of help with the practicalities, Anthony, we are all aware that I am not a long-term solution. And I have not been involved in child rearing since you were one.”

“Despite our limitations, my other self and I have been drafting lists of essentials for Young Sir’s development and we would like your input, Miss Potts.”

“Mine?” Pepper dragged her eyes away from Alexander to look up at one of the cameras.

“I believe it was Mr. Jarvis’ intention to ensure that Young Sir has more to play with than circuit boards.”

“Don’t knock the stuff that made you come into existence, J.”

“The objection was not mine, Sir.”

“Eh, he’s probably right, anyway. Jarvis is never wrong.” Tony said it with such gravity that Edwin leaned into him and wished he was the sort of man to bestow random kisses.

Ms. Potts bit back her grin and asked, “How may I be of assistance, Mr. Stark?”

“I need you and the assorted Jarvises to handle the necessities of baby life.” The list that JARVIS had been accumulating from various blogs, books, and who the hell knew where else popped up on Pepper’s tablet. Despite spending more time with JARVIS than any person other than Tony, sometimes even Pepper was thrown by the level of care that could be shown by a program. Though, she did get distracted by JARVIS needing her signature and a human’s opinion on a standing order to a breast milk bank, which Pepper didn’t even know was a thing, let alone how JARVIS had found it.

“It is an organization run through The Children’s Hospital of Southern California. According to the studies I have examined, the primary difference between what is offered to a child with breast milk versus formula is limited to immunities present in the milk. Those as of yet have not been replicated in formula, despite the convenience and presence of all other necessary nutrients. Considering that Sir is unlikely to employ a wet nurse, supplementing from the donation bank seemed the best compromise.”

“There are still wet nurses?” JARVIS flashed several websites advertising the services across the TV screen.

“It’s California, J. We have everything.” Somewhere in the conversation Tony had liberated his son from Edwin’s arms, despite the world-ending terror Edwin had expected from Anthony. Already he was doing that strange little rocking bounce that all parents seemed to manage instinctively.

Instead of bustling off to handle the matter herself, the same way she did pretty much everything else in Anthony’s life, Miss Potts settled in on the couch beside Edwin and asked, “Any opinions about the nursery?”

Without looking away from his son, Anthony answered. “Just get the same woman who did the house.”

“I refuse to let you subject your child to the same cold nonsense as the rest of this place.” Edwin objected.

Tony just rolled his eyes, and Miss Potts pressed her lips together to stop herself from reminding anyone that the Malibu house had been the subject of a spread in both  _Architecture Digest_ and  _Interior Design_. It was sleek, it was modern, and it was absolutely not the place for a tiny Tony Stark. Even after living here for years, every inch of the building was just as pristine as it had been when the photographers came. Tony’s workshop was the only room that looked like it had been lived in. Even though all of them could already visualize Anthony’s child running around playing catch with the ‘bots, the basement was no permanent place for a child.

“I refuse to let you turn over the purchase of any and all childcare goods to some third party who would choose things for their contemporary nonsense and not for their comfort value. Just think of all the sharp points Alexander could hit his head on. That is not to say,” Edwin patted Miss Potts’ hand, “that your input will not be invaluable, Miss Potts. Especially in regards to clothes for the young master. I am concerned that if left to our own devices Master Anthony and I will either outfit the boy in sweatpants or three-piece suits and no in between.”

Miss Potts laughed. “I do know enough about babies to know that onesies are important.”

“I believe we are fully stocked on those.” Edwin nodded at the mountain on the table behind them. “Though, they appear to all be in white.”

“The store we purchased the other supplies from only had them available in bulk in the single color.”

JARVIS sounded hurt, and Mr. Hogan objected on his behalf. “You tell ‘em, J. Bulk shit is hard.” Edwin and Miss Potts shared a smile at the way Mr. Hogan stood over Anthony’s shoulder to look at Alexander and rocked with him in time.

JARVIS pulled up the shopping lists and scrolled through pictures of cribs, rugs, and other baby paraphernalia on Ms. Potts’ tablet. After their comments, the AI immediately began sorting through to give Anthony less options than the entire selection of Amazon. “Anthony, before concerning yourself with such accouterment, I believe that calling Mrs. Rhodes might be your best option.”

“Thirty years she’s been telling you to just call her ‘Mama Rhodes,’ J.”

“And Mr. Stark senior told me to call him Howard. If I did not cave to his request, I will not to hers. Now stop attempting to distract me and call the woman.”

“So she can tell me what crib to buy?”

“Anthony,” Edwin murmured, with no scolding but all the weight of worry. “Would you like to tell me why in particular why you’re so hesitant to call?”

Tony let his son grab his finger. “I haven’t told Rhodey yet.”

Ms. Potts and Mr. Hogan both just stared at Edwin and refused to open their mouths. “I didn’t know you were capable of not telling Mr. Rhodes anything.” Anthony didn’t respond. Edwin pressed. “Why not?”

“I just haven’t had a chance yet.”

“I haven’t believed that tone since you were three and I’m not going to start now.”

“I haven’t!” Tony finally looked up from his son. “I’ve had the kid for like an hour, I’m allowed to not be able to get ahold of Rhodey.”

“You said that you hadn’t told him, not that you hadn’t been able to get ahold of him.”

“J…”

“Anthony.”

“Because my kid popped out of the ether, Jarvis! I do my best to not just out and out lie to Rhodey when I can help it. I can’t tell him where my kid came from and I haven’t figured out what in the hell to tell him yet!”

Alexander garbled out something and it was hard to summon up the will to argue when you had a baby gibbering at you, demanding to know why its father was making all this noise.

Edwin did not point out that all Anthony had told him at this point was ‘magic’, though he doubted Miss Potts and Mr. Hogan had even gotten that much. “Tony, it’s Rhodey.” Miss Potts said. “He’s your best friend.”

“I do not believe the concern lies primarily with their friendship.” Edwin corrected, his eyes on Anthony’s shaking hands. “Do you believe the Colonel will disapprove of you fathering a child out of wedlock, Anthony? I would say it seems unlikely but I confess that I have never quite been able to tell what the Colonel will find objectionable since he has gone along with so many of your experiments.”

“I don’t doubt Rhodey, J. It’s not about him. It’s that I think there were only a handful of people who knew I was going to Afghanistan and I don’t like the odds of terrorists snagging Tony Stark on a random attack.”

That… was a horrifying thought that had never once crossed Edwin’s mind. “Since Colonel Rhodes never would have leaked the information, I assume you are concerned about others in his division?”

“Oh J, I don’t even know what to be worried about at this point. It would be better if it was just some random solider bragging that got picked up.” Anthony’s breaths started to shallow. “The worse option is that I can tell you the name of every person who knew before I landed that I was going to be in Afghanistan, and fourteen of them can give Rhodey orders.”

“He can’t be forced to tell them about his friend’s son.” Edwin objected.

“I’m a peerless military asset that’s refusing to play ball and Lex’s existence is valuable intel they could use to bring me back to the table. Hiding information about us would be treason to them.”

“ _Terrorists_ threatened you Tony, not the US Government.” Pepper objected.

“They were terrorists who shouldn’t have known I was even in the country, let alone known enough to attack a convoy of US troops, kill them, and abduct me. Everything was too perfect for dumb luck.”

“You think someone in Mr. Rhodes’ command sold you out to terrorists?” Edwin tried and failed to keep the disbelief from his voice.

“I think I don’t know!” Anthony snapped. “But if I’m right and they were willing to do that to me, what do you think they’d do to Lex? And what do you think they’d do to Rhodey when they find out he knew about Lex and lied? I don’t want Rhodey dead in friendly fire because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

Anthony was pale and shaking, his child motionless in arms. Edwin felt every one of his 94 years as he rose to his feet. “Mr. Rhodes will be fine. Alexander will be fine. We will figure everything out, Anthony. But first, you need to breathe.”

Anthony gulped. “OK. Yeah, OK.”

“Breathe, please.”

“Breathing won’t make it better, J.”

“It will, however, keep you from passing out with your child in your arms.”

Anthony started liked he’d forgotten Alexander was there. “Fuck!” Edwin grabbed Tony before he shoved Alexander away.

“Anthony! You need to calm down!”

“Not once in the history of the world has telling someone to calm down actually calmed them down!” Anthony spat the words. Though he didn’t calm, he did freeze before his panic damaged his son. Alexander rewarded the action with a gummy smile and pats for good behavior. Anthony’s tension couldn’t withstand his laughter.

“Hell, J. What am I gonna do?”

“I would recommend calling a therapist since my only advice has apparently never been helpful in the history of the world.”

“Nope. Nope, nope, no therapists.” Anthony pulled away.

“Tony,” Miss Potts sighed, while Mr. Hogan said, “It could only help, Boss.”

“Nope. The Board already prepped an injunction that Obie had to talk them down from, therapy is just going to prove their point. No therapy, no telling Rhodey. Privacy is our friend right now.”

“Wait, what?”

“I know, it’s weird coming from me, but privacy—”

“Not that. The Board filed an injunction against you?” Miss Potts rose to her feet with her irritation.

“It’s prepped.” Anthony shrugged. “Obie came by this morning with the document to try and talk me into giving the Board some ground. They hadn’t filed it when he got here and considering it’s Obie, he’ll probably talk them into giving him a few days to work on me before they break and do it anyway.”

“Did,” Edwin cleared his throat. “Did Mr. Stane see Alexander?”

“Nope. Even  _I_ thought that was a stupid idea, J.”

“How long are we going to keep not telling the world about your child, Tony?”

“Until all the boss’ ducks are in a row and the little boss is protected from whatever the government, or the terrorists, or the Board, or the crazies might want.” Mr. Hogan said, the man with several nieces and nephews understanding the feral desire to protect better than anyone. “Also, if I was the kind of person who wanted to blackmail the boss into starting up weapons production again, I’d go for custody, or accusations that he’s not fit to keep the kid.”

“Which is why J told me to call the two of you first, and I didn’t because I was having a bit of a panic attack.”

“Right.” Miss Potts sighed, then nodded. “Did the mother sign over her rights?”

“Nope. I doubt she even went to a hospital to give birth. She’s kind of the mother earth type.”

“Can you contact her to get her to sign the paperwork?”

“I can try.”

“Try might not be good enough, Tony. Without her signature on everything, and probably even a few genetic tests, we’re open to other people pretending they’re the biological mother.”

“I’ll put JARVIS on it. She was here yesterday, so we’ve got a place to start.”

“And me, Boss?”

“Someone’s got to get the kid’s stuff here without ending up in the tabloids.”

“I have the purchases being delivered to a temporary storage location, Mr. Hogan. I will send the updated lists of expected materials and delivery times to you.”

“Thanks, JARVIS. If we’re going to end up with a bunch of smaller deliveries, we might want to try…” Mr. Hogan’s conversation faded out as he went up the stairs. The first thing on the list was binkies and he knew from his sister’s kids that those were fundamental. Miss Potts told Edwin she’d schedule a shopping excursion with one of her pregnant friends and anything else she’d route through JARVIS and online purchasing.

As excited as she was to hunt down band t-shirts and baby sunglasses for the tiny Tony, her first task would be lawyer shopping. “None of SI’s lawyers know how to handle custody issues, and even if we could, we can’t rely on that department until we know who participated in the injunction.

Anthony waved her off with Alexander’s little hand and wished her luck drawing blood and making war. Miss Potts rolled her eyes but still asked, “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?” She paused. “ _Misters_  Stark.”

“That’ll be all, Miss Potts.”

Edwin stayed on the sofa, chin propped up on his fist and the same expression he’d worn through most of Anthony’s adolescence while waiting for him to tell the truth. Despite Anthony’s progress in numerous other areas of his life, in this one he remained just as defiant as ever. “What?”

“Did you know that you employ the same tactics when you’re trying to hide technology as you used to when attempting to hide your pornography?”

Tony blushed so easily that the casual observer never would have guessed he had quite so many sex tapes roaming around the internet. “Really? We’re gonna go there, J? Aren’t you supposed to be asking me about Lex’s mother?”

“Oh, we’ll get there shortly. And given the unplanned child in your arms, references to your libido seemed appropriate. The last time you had something laid out on one of your work tables of that size and shape,” Edwin nodded at the tarp-covered table, “it was a boyfriend you were trying to hide from your father.”

“Oh, geez.” Tony buried his face in Alexander’s belly. “Don’t remind me. That idiot deserved to get caught by Howard.”

“And the body you’ve currently got on the table?”

“That… will definitely be a thing. But right now, we’ve got more important stuff to worry about.

J, pull up the Mother protocol.”

On the TV, JARVIS brought up video of Anthony stopping midway through a dinner of leftover Chinese that made Edwin sigh. JARVIS sped through Anthony’s rather restful sleep and rising shortly after dawn. Edwin didn’t ask why they were watching Anthony roam out to his balcony where JARVIS slowed things back to real time so they could watch as from one blink to the next, the newborn Alexander that Edwin recognized from their first conversation appeared in Anthony’s arms. Edwin didn’t pause for questions, just watched as Anthony and JARVIS panicked at the sight of Alexander, Anthony’s explanation to the AI, and how in another blink the child grew to make his father more comfortable.

Soon enough the replay was just watching Tony parent his son, which Edwin didn’t need to observe on the screen when it was happening right before him. “Want to watch it again?”

“No, Anthony. I believe I have all the facts. May I assume that Master Alexander’s mother did not, in fact, provide you with a means of contacting her?”

“Nope. But everything else about this has been magical nonsense, so why wouldn’t that be how I get custody?”

“Indeed. And I assume this is why you are hesitant to share with Colonel Rhodes.”

“It’s all the same stuff as before, but now add a layer of supernatural mother to it. Even if he could justify keeping his mouth shut about Lex, concealing the existence of the supernatural would probably be literal treason.”

“And why you are pretending to Mr. Hogan and Ms. Potts that the mother is an ordinary woman who you slept with some time ago and she only brought the child to you this morning.”

“It seems like the kind of thing that should be kept under wraps.”

“I agree entirely.”

“Then why do you have that tone?”

“Because you told me.”

“Of course, I did. You’re Jarvis. You’re Grandpa Jarvis.”

“Indeed I am.” Edwin cleared his throat, too humbled for words by Anthony’s trust. “Now,” Edwin levered himself off the sofa and straightened his jacket. “Other Self, I believe we ought to make our way out of the workshop and into the house proper. If you would please bring up all those options of baby furniture that you’ve been collating, Anthony and I can examine them on the living room screen and start getting things sent to Mr. Hogan for delivery.”

“J…” Tony whined.

“The sooner we get a bed for the young master the sooner the both of us can get some proper sleep.”

“ _That_  is a good argument.”


	5. Chapter 5

Edwin had never much been one for prayer. Neither in wars, nor in espionage, and not now in grief. However, the loneliness that had endured for the decades after his Ana’s death was quite enough to make him communicative. Still not with the divine – or rather, not with what anyone else might consider divine.

While his beloved Ana had never gotten the recognition she deserved in life, to him she had been a treasure beyond compare. Such a treasure that despite the forty years since her demise, Edwin had never really recovered. And so, every night it was not to deity that Edwin prayed, but to Ana.

Edwin laid down on the left-hand side of the bed, old bones settling into the softness of the finest mattress money could buy. Exhausted as he was, it was a struggle to hold onto consciousness long enough to roll over and stretch out his hand to the place that had been Ana’s. It was easier that way, to pray to her with eyes closed and hand extended as though at any moment she would press her palm to his and comment about the day. She had not yet, but one day soon Edwin knew he was going to close his eyes and open them to Ana’s smile. It was that impending certainty that he wanted to discuss with her tonight.

“He’s quite beautiful. Though, the mother could be a tree and Anthony would still manage to have a beautiful child, so that’s to be expected. He’s been alive for a day and he’s already got Anthony’s disposition. I’m terrified for when Alexander starts walking. He’ll be in to everything, and goodness knows that he’s got even more to get into here than Anthony had at the manor.

“You would be quite proud of Anthony for how he chose things for the nursery. I had expected it to be like pulling teeth – and perhaps it would have been without my other self handling the preliminary sorting – but he was wonderful. It’s all still sleek, grey nonsense, and half of it he told JARVIS to take a picture of for inspiration because he could build it better instead of just buying it outright. I convinced him not to start on the crib from scratch, but Anthony spent the afternoon assembling bookshelves. Mind you, my other self did all the cutting to keep Alexander’s ears away from the device, They’re more hexagonal than rectangular **,** and they take up and entire wall, but he made them.

“And, my love, Anthony bought a wonderfully soft rocking chair. It was his first purchase. He insisted that Mr. Hogan bring it to the house the moment it arrived then deposited Alexander and myself in the chair so we could sit with him while he worked. You’ll be proud of me that I didn’t start to weep when I realized.”

Edwin drew in a slow breath and didn’t waste time lying to his wife as he moved into harsher matters. “In truth, I could not enjoy the afternoon as I ought because I am terrified for other things. Alexander was born yesterday morning you know, and already he’s several months. JARVIS says that it’s not a steady aging. Instead, it’s a rare leap or bound that appears to be triggered by something that JARVIS is not willing to say for certain without more data. I can tell Anthony would rather he never have enough leaps in aging for JARVIS to be able to compute an answer.

“But children aren’t supposed to leap in age. I don’t need to tell you that. I think Anthony is terrified for when the boy leaps in front of someone, or he’s worried that he can’t set up all the paperwork for Alexander without being certain that the boy isn’t going to age enough to nullify everything.

“I… I feel a hypocrite for saying this about a man who was abducted by terrorists, but there are terrible things in the world, darling. Terrible things from people who consider themselves quite good and above the law. I cannot fathom what they would do to Alexander if given the chance. Peggy hasn’t been in a position to do a thing for Anthony for years, and I can’t imagine what SHIELD would subject Alexander to in the name of world security. Who knows what sorts of other evils are lurking out there that have cropped up in all the years since I’ve been involved? But Anthony is going to have to deal with them. I won’t be around forever to keep a lookout, and how do I even begin to explain SHIELD and the things I saw when all my information is so out of date?

“Anthony already knows that Alexander is under threat. Anthony got abducted half a dozen times himself when he was a boy so he knows to watch for that, but there are madmen out there the likes of which even Anthony hasn’t seen. My darling, I don’t know how to protect them from it.

“I could drag Peggy here, Alzheimer’s or not, and insist that she give him some sort of explanation to protect Alexander, but she would never come. Worse, SHIELD would ask why I took the former head of their organization out of her safe housing. And we can’t tell Peggy that Alexander isn’t quite human because, though I still love her dearly, we can’t trust that with the Alzheimer’s she would be able to keep the secret to herself, and—oh, Ana. I don’t know what to do. I couldn’t even protect you when I was at my prime and now…”

“You are dying.” The woman’s voice quite interrupted Edwin’s pause to choke back tears and surprised him out of his melancholic desire for Ana to wrap her arms around him and promise that he could rise to the challenge. Instead, he found himself lying beside Ana’s opposite. She was muscular where Ana had been lean, dark where she had been pale, and black curls instead of sleek, blonde locks. Braced on an elbow with her head in her hand, she stared down at Edwin as though he was a particularly interesting ladybug that had crawled across her blanket and she had not yet decided to flick him away.

Despite all that, Edwin was not afraid. Somehow, he knew precisely who she was. “At this very moment, you mean? Because if I’m going to die here and now, I should like to leave a few instructions for my electronic counterpart about how to distribute my books and whatnot. Also, I should at least tell Anthony that SHIELD exists so he can know to protect his son from their machinations. Also, I ought to tell you that there are several documents you need to sign to protect Alexander from people who would try supposedly legal means to steal him away.”

The woman reached out and ran her fingers through the soft flop of hair Edwin’s that despite decades of pomade still refused to be tamed. It was the first time he’d had a woman’s hands on him in years and strangely enough it didn’t feel like cheating. “Those are your concerns upon being confronted with death?”

Edwin Jarvis had long since stopped being the sort of man who lied to himself, so while he would like to pretend that deathbed confessions were something common to all humanity, he knew it was rather more a matter of the woman he was confessing to than the timing. “Yes. There is a certain agony that comes with loving a child that is not and can never be yours. You think of all the things you might teach them and the man you might help them become, only to be left with the sure knowledge that no matter what you do and no matter how much you love, you will never be their parent. You will never be the person who will really shape them. It’s a special kind of torture, to so desperately love a child that you will only be able to influence from the periphery.

“When I had Ana, the burden wasn’t quite so awful since we bore it together, but after she passed… I confess that I failed to support Anthony as I ought to have. I left him to his father’s devices. I did not fight the matter when Howard sent him away to boarding school, and I was retired when his parents died. He deserved more than I gave him and I have spent the last thirty years regretting all that I failed to give him in my own weakness. In my grief I chose to protect myself rather than the child in my care. I will not do so a second time.”

“Even if you only have a short time with them?”

“I only had a short amount of time with my wife, that doesn’t mean it was any less important or influential than the decades I spent with others. It all depends on how you spend the time. If all I have is the rest of this night, I can make it valuable.”

“How?”

Edwin had answered the question already, but she wasn’t the sort of woman you said that to. “I’ll tell Tony and JARVIS everything I know about SHIELD, for one. Out of date my information may be, it will be enough to at least get Tony looking in the right direction and know that there are even worse domestic threats he needs to protect his family against. And I can pluck Alexander out of his crib for another. I’ll tell them everything I know with my grandson in my arms. And as much as Anthony would no doubt like to start his search immediately, I’ll make him sit beside me on the sofa while I speak, just so I might have the pleasure of his presence.”

“And if you have tomorrow?”

“I’ll probably spend it precisely the same way I would tonight, only once I made it to the point that I’d told him everything I could about SHIELD, then I’d do my best to see him established for the future.”

“How so?”

“Well, as flattered as I am that Anthony called me, he needs to speak to Mrs. Rhodes. She is the only person of our acquaintance who has actually raised children well and she would be in a better position than any of us to help him. I persuaded JARVIS to begin the search for a therapist without Anthony’s permission, so that needs to be seen through. And I still need to get you to sign the papers releasing custody of Alexander to Anthony and confirming you are his mother.

“Beyond that, I owe Tony an apology for failing him. I imagine that above all else he needs to know that I believe he will be a wonderful father. He is already. Anthony is far better than Howard was and he has the capacity to do better than his father could have ever dreamed. He needs to know that I’m certain of him, and perhaps that certainty might ease his way a bit in what I’m sure is a terribly difficult transition.

“In truth, I would probably make a list of the essentials that I’ve wanted to tell him for years but lacked the courage to do so. If I should live beyond the list, then I would carry on saying every word that popped into my head until my time ran out.”

“And if I gave you another fifty years?”

Edwin blamed it being the middle of the night for why it took so long for his brain to process the idea. “I don’t believe my knees could take that, Miss.”

“I could reset you, Edwin. I could make you a young man again, or perhaps go back to those days when you were running about saving the world with Agent Carter and you were almost Anthony’s own age, or even the slightly weathered fellow who first held Tony Stark in his arms.”

Edwin gulped. “You could do that?”

“You’re all like leaves hanging from a tree, each of you clinging to your own branches, desperately fighting against oncoming winter. Your color is faded, long past green and no longer even yellow. You are dead and brown, clinging to the branch as though one winter breeze won’t break you from the tree.”

“Forgive me if putting color back in a leaf doesn’t sound difficult enough, let alone making an old man young again.”

“Both are simply life, Edwin Jarvis.” She stroked her fingers through the forelock of hair and twirled it around her finger as she tugged it forward so Edwin could catch a glimpse of the dark brown her power had returned it to. “Life is simple to manage.”

“And things that have already fallen from the tree?”

“Can be brought back, but there is a price to pay. The leaves have fallen to the Earth as bodies to the ground, but all that gave them color and spirit moves on. The soul of your Ana is the property of someone else, while her body belongs to my sister, Death. As Anthony would explain it, death is a chemical reaction that  _can_  be undone, but it is difficult to do. To drag a soul back through a door that is only meant to be passed through one direction is painful, and very well might rip a soul pieces, destroying any chance you would have to see your Ana on the other side. Even if you were willing to risk her, the price my sister would ask me to pay for violating her sovereignty is too high.”

“Thank you for explaining it to me. Though I wouldn’t risk Ana like that.”

“No. It is not love to wish such a thing, to rob a person of their peace for your own comfort. You would have ended yourself long ago if her absence was so unbearable.”

“I love her.”

“It is neither an unhealthy love, nor a corrupting one. You are not like one of those sad children in the old stories who value themselves so little they would end their own lives just for company and mistake it for love. No, you are so selfless a man that you would spend your last moments tending to your son and mine. That, dear Edwin, is why I am offering you a choice.

“I can breathe a little life into you, just enough for a month or two more so you might settle your emotional affairs as perfectly as one could hope. Or, I can make you bright green again and you will stay on the tree for another lifetime.”

“I don’t… forgive me my lady, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I would not like to be greener than Anthony.”

“You would like to die soon enough that you leave behind my son?” There was all manner of tension in that question, but Edwin didn’t lie.

“Rather, I thought I buried Anthony once before, quite recently, and I don’t believe I have it in me to do it again. Perhaps a slightly yellow leaf, but with a particularly tough stem?”

Had Edwin managed to stay awake he would have watched as through the rest of the night the color seeped back into his hair like fabric soaking up dye. The wrinkles smoothed from his skin, what little muscle he’d ever had expanded his frame, his bones thickened and his back straightened until the sun’s light broke over the horizon. Save for two streaks of silver at his temples, Edwin Jarvis was precisely as he had been the first time Anthony Stark was placed in his arms – if perhaps with a bit more strength in those muscles and a bit more durability in those bones then there had been the first time.

Had Edwin been more than human, he would have seen the tendrils of light working their way up from the floor, roots of magic weaving through the stone and mortar and wrapping themselves around Edwin’s limbs, drawing strength from the ground and pumping life into the man. What he wouldn’t have seen was the mark upon his soul, the brush of a feather against his forehead so he could be found for all the rest of his long years upon the earth.

As it was, the woman brushed her fingertips over Edwin’s forehead and he closed his eyes at the gentle pleasure of the touch. When he opened them again it was to the wakeup call he had instructed his other self to provide, quite more hesitant than he had ever heard from the AI before.

“Mr. …. Mr. Jarvis?”

“Good morning, Other Self.”

“You appear to be quite altered from the last time we spoke, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Your sensors are not failing you, I am.”

Edwin rolled out of bed and took rather more time than he would like to admit examining himself in the mirror to be sure that his body was precisely as he remembered it. It was not, of course, but a rather better maintained version of himself than it had been, for which he offered up silent gratitude to Alexander’s mother. (Ana was still the only one he would offer vocal prayers to.)

Edwin’s suits no longer fit him, and JARVIS said he was both too tall and too thin to fit into Anthony’s. “I can have something delivered for you off the rack, Mr. Jarvis, though it will not be here until after breakfast.”

“That’s all right, Other Self. I suppose I can last a few days in the comfortable sort of clothes that Anthony has.” He was unsure whether it was JARVIS or Miss Potts who had seen to it that the chest of drawers in the spare bedroom had a few clean t-shirts and pajama bottoms in various sizes. It was the sort of thoughtful exercise both of them were prone to, but JARVIS was the only member of the party who would ever suppose Anthony would have someone in a spare room he intended to actually keep fully dressed. Either way, Edwin was rather pleased with the new clothes considering that all the things in his bag held that particular smell of old man that, despite his best efforts, had been following him around since his 90th birthday.

“It is Saturday, after all. And I vaguely recall Anthony lecturing me on the benefit of weekend clothing.”

He and JARVIS had a chat about things that the AI might expect from young Alexander if he was to be as much a duplicate of his father as he already appeared to be. The circumstances would only be made more difficult by the boy’s mother who, to JARVIS’ frustration, seemed perfectly capable of slipping in out of the house at will, with no care or concern for his security systems. If that was an indicator of her disposition, they were in even more trouble with the boy. (Though, the stack of custody forms on the kitchen counter were all signed in a flowing script that looked more like scrollwork than an actual name, so there was hope yet.)

They were discussing the concept of child proofing when Edwin turned to add some more finished bacon to the pile and found Anthony and Alexander in the doorway. He was being stared at by twin brown eyes, both with identical little furrows that long experience told Edwin came from being confronted by a problem that didn’t immediately unravel its answer to their exceptional brains.

“Good morning, Sirs. Your eggs and bottle will each be ready in two minutes.”

“She came back.”

“She did indeed. I could not tell you a precise time and my other self is rather concerned about her ability to subvert his security.”

It seemed Edwin’s voice was sufficiently the same that Alexander’s furrow smoothed. He was quite content to stay in his father’s arms, but now looked up at the man to wonder why he seemed so concerned.

“Did you… uh…”

“I was given the choice, if that’s what you’re asking, Master Anthony. She provided me with several options and I chose to be rejuvenated to this particular age.” Tony just stared. Edwin raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather I had not?”

Anthony’s answer was to all but throw himself across the room and into Edwin’s arms. Alexander squealed in surprise and Edwin lost his spatula in the tumble but caught them both. It was strange to once again be tall enough to rest his cheek on top of Anthony’s head while the man all but burrowed into him, but Edwin cast out another silent prayer of thanks to Alexander’s mother.

After a long minute, Tony grumbled, “The bacon is burning” without actually bothering to move.

“Let it burn, Sir.”

“Nope.” Tony pulled back. “Nope, we’re not doing that.” He pressed Alexander into Edwin’s arms, and the boy squawked in displeasure at their cuddles being disrupted. “No more sir-ing. I’m Tony, he’s Alexander, you’re Grandpa. Or do you want to be uncle? No, that’s weird, you’re grandpa. And if anyone asks why Jarvis’ kid is grandpa instead of uncle we’ll just shrug and say, ‘kids’. I hear people do that all the time like it actually explains anything because they keep pretending it does.” Tony plucked the rather burned bacon out of the pan with his bare fingers and dropped them into the garbage one by one, his back pointedly to Edwin and Alexander all throughout his ramble.

Edwin shared a commiserating look with Alexander and looped an arm around Tony’s shoulders, dragging him into a hug. He dropped a kiss to Tony’s forehead and thanked him for handling the bacon, but a man cannot have just bacon for breakfast. “What about pancakes? I need carbs, right?”

“You treat pancakes as a vehicle for syrup delivery, that doesn’t count. However, you can have toast.”

“Toast I can do.” Tony bounded over to the fridge, accepting JARVIS’ advice that the bread was actually in a cupboard.

“Come, Alexander. You sit with me and let’s see how long it takes your father before he decides he needs to remodel to toaster to make it stop burning things instead of just turning down the temperature.”

They had the sort of breakfast that Edwin had long dreamed about. The three of them sat around the kitchen island, stacks of toast, bacon, and fruit that they all worked on while Tony opened boxes filled with the necessities of baby life and Edwin kept him from adding upgrades.

(“Alexander doesn’t need wheels on his Bumbo chair, Anthony.”

“But, Jarvis—”

“That’s the opposite of its point. No.”)

Edwin could have lived in that morning forever, ordering the placement of furniture, teasing Anthony about his inability to decipher Ikea instructions (“It’s a little cartoon man telling me what to do, J!  _No one_  is supposed to understand it!”), and taunting Alexander with the soft, jangly blocks that held no appeal to the baby at all. Even when they positioned him with his back to his father, he didn’t forget there were better things in the room to be doing. Alexander kept abandoning the blocks to try in vain to make his way to Tony and the tools. (He shouldn’t be so close to crawling, but Edwin moved baby gates and other protective items up his mental list.)

Alas, the morning was not to last forever. Edwin clung to it as long as possible, but when the nursery was done and Alexander was down for his nap with one of the several blankets Anthony was rotating through to discover a favorite, Edwin pulled Anthony in for what he prayed was not his last hug. “Hey, J. How you doing?”

“Anthony, I… need to tell you something.”

Anthony pulled back and cradled Edwin’s face between his palms, just as Edwin had done so often for Tony through the years. “What’s wrong?”

Edwin drew a fortifying breath. “There is an organization called SHIELD.”


	6. Chapter 6

Tony had been waterboarded, but waiting an entire day before turning himself on SHIELD turned out to be more difficult. A week ago, getting told about his father heading up a secret spy organization would’ve meant retreating to the lab for however long it took to dig up every scrap of information that hadn’t been hidden away in hard copy.

But today, it meant choking back the urge to scream. It meant not demanding to know why in the hell Jarvis hadn’t told him all this years ago. It meant not opening the can of worms that was his parents’ deaths. It meant sitting there and asking level questions and breathing through his rage because Lex got fussy when his father was upset. It meant casually telling JARVIS to do some snooping while Tony focused on trying to help Lex negotiate his little arms to get the food into his mouth instead of smeared across his face.

During Lex’s second nap, Tony went to the lab and kept his back to the main computers and modified his armor with shaking hands. JARVIS didn’t update him on the search, instead cranking up the music to try and down out the voices in Tony’s head that were demanding he didn’t stop until he knew everything.

It felt not unlike kicking cocaine after college, with the shakes and the white-knuckling through temptation. He had the same anticipation for putting Lex to bed so he could research until dawn as he used to have for good sex. Some part of Tony’s brain recognized he shouldn’t feel about leaving his kid the same way as he’d felt about orgasms when he was a teenager.

Before Tony could literally get tremors, Jarvis came down with Lex in his arms, fed, changed, and ready to play.

Tony whirled away from the armor. “Why didn’t you call me upstairs?”

“Because you’re allowed bring your son into your workshop.”

“I don’t—I won’t—”

“That was all you wanted as a child, Anthony, I remember. You would sit outside your father’s workshop for hours waiting for him to let you in. You set up your playroom to look as much like it as you could. Of course your son is going to want to be with your while you work. You might as well get started now.”

“But where do I put him?”

“Anthony,” Jarvis sighed. “Did you not notice the crib JARVIS had built to protect Alexander from any experiments going awry?” And what do you know, JARVIS had turned the fabricator on plexiglass, making a circular crib on sturdy metal legs and no cage bars for flying shrapnel to sneak its way in.

“The other kids help you with the mattress, J?”

“Indeed, Sir.”

It was less a mattress and more a bunch of towels, t-shirts, and what Tony was pretty sure was disemboweled cushion all shoved in what looked like a massive, stitched-together pillowcase. Tony really didn’t want to know. And he didn’t want to be there when Pepper found whatever piece of furniture they’d sacrificed for the cause. “That’s some good work, guys,” Tony called over to the ‘bots, who all waved and chirped in pride. “But there’s no lid to protect him. That means I shouldn’t have Lex down here yet, right?”

“Anthony.” And wow. That was one hell of an eye roll. “Engineer with your son.”

Jarvis deposited Lex in his arms and headed back up the stairs, no hesitation at all in his trust that Tony wouldn’t accidentally scar his son. “All right.”

Tony bounced the kid, who stared up at him like, ‘Well Dad, get on with it. We’ve got science to do.’

“OK, baby boy, this is called a UI chip.” Tony popped open the drawer he’d been ignoring like an ex-girlfriend and handed the plastic end of a blank one to Lex for gumming on. “They’re what we put a lot of our AI coding on because we’re a little bit paranoid and don’t want to accidentally create Skynet and give them access to the Internet where they can get out and control the world.” Tony basically followed the same protocols the squishy scientists did when dropping a beaker would equal bioterrorism. The computer he worked on for coding AIs was connected only to JARVIS, who had about a thousand different walls to keep anything from slipping out or getting in.

“Right now, you, me and JARVIS are going to create an AI that’s going to set things on fire.” Tony paused before he turned to the coding computer. “Metaphorically on fire. We don’t set things on fire anymore.” The Iron Man suit was there underneath a drop cloth waiting for Tony’s final adjustments and silently calling him a hypocrite. “Unless it’s in self-defense. Or protecting other people. We can set things on fire for that and that rule absolutely applies in this situation.”

Lex shoved the UI chip further into his mouth and Tony took that for consent. “All right, then.” Tony grabbed towels from the closet next to the decontamination shower and folded them into the space in between the suit’s legs to prop Lex against them. It was as close as Tony could get to the half-upright pillow circles JARVIS had on special order and Happy should be turning up with at any time. “You good?” Lex kept chewing, and really, Tony had scoffed at those people on the Internet who talked about the value of teaching babies sign language, but boy was he wrong.

“J, maybe let me know if L starts slipping?”

JARVIS agreed like he was baffled it was a question at all, then pulled up a blank slate for coding and got started. Tony fussed with his kid while JARVIS laid down the basics until Lex concerned himself more with shoving a toe in his mouth alongside the UI chip. Tony left Lex with a laugh and joined in with JARVIS on more grownup fun. Tony and JARVIS coded around one another the way other people waltzed. JARVIS cut in lines from his own code, bits of personality and protectiveness that had grown in him over time, mixed with Tony’s safeguards to keep his new creation from going full AUTO.

Tony was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t realized JARVIS would rather not be hunting through Stark Industries’ mainframe himself to get all the information they needed on weapons trading, double-dealing, and blackmail. JARVIS could do it, of course – as he’d sniffed at Tony when he tried to apologize – but it required processing power that the AI would rather devote to picking paint colors for Lex’s bedroom. (Tony was pretty sure J was joking, but he and Jarvis had been locked in a debate over certain shades of blue, so what did Tony know?)

Instead, they coded a new AI that would be under JARVIS’ auspices and control the same way the ‘bots were, but smart enough to do JARVIS’ hunting for him. He could’ve managed it when there was nothing to sort through but their own systems and accounts for people Tony wrote paychecks to, but hunting shady government organizations was more of a full-time job.

Given the ‘hunting’ aspect, Tony had been pitching redneck names the entire time they were coding. JARVIS decided to swing things a different direction. “Might I recommend APOLLO, Sir?”

“That’s a little harder core than my naming conventions usually go, isn’t it, J?”

“You do have a habit of naming us whatever first strikes your sleep-addled mind and then attempting to attribute some deeper meaning to the name afterwards, yes Sir. I thought that in this instance forethought might be the preferred option.”

Tony didn’t object since forethought really was the entire point of this little exercise, and the new AI would be just as much JARVIS’ kid as it was Tony’s. “All right. What’s your forethought pitch for APOLLO?”

“Amongst other things, he is the Greek and Roman god of truth, prophecy, light, and plagues. He was also considered the protector of young men and according to numerous epithets was considered the ‘averter of evil’. I had thought perhaps to name this new AI after Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, but we have reached the point where it feels as though this AI is particularly male.”

“It’s a weighty name for a new little program.”

“He shall bear a weighty task.” Lex chose that moment to give a little snuffing sigh, having slumped down in his towel nest, unimpressed by all the typing.

“Hey, this is a fundamental aspect of technology, I’ll have you know. You don’t get a JARVIS unless you learn how to properly code.”

Lex blew a spit bubble.

“Yeah, I get you.” Tony left his computer and braced his elbows on Iron Man’s legs to lean over and whisper. “Think it’s not a violation of the dad code to do some real engineering in front of you?”

Lex gave a kick of his fat little feet and smacked Iron Man’s leg. Tony took that as a yes. He plucked up Lex and relocated him to the plexiglass crib before he tugged it around the sofa to a spot the ‘bots had cleared by Tony’s desk so the little guy could watch Tony’s experiments.

They probably should’ve been done with the lab earlier than they were, but Lex seemed to nap just fine to the sound of Tony narrating his actions while he ran diagnostics on the separate pieces of armor. They did take a dinner break that turned into tummy time on the upstairs rug, but they were back downstairs with the twilight.

It was just, Tony was so close to done, and this was a project he wanted Lex to see. So maybe instead of taking his tired child to the nursery and settling in for a snuggle in the rocking chair that was on Tony’s list of things to redesign, he thought it would be all right if they went back to the workshop, just for a minute. (And maybe that minute was another hour.)

But then the suit was done and ready for testing, and Lex had propped himself up next to the glass to watch with eyes so bright they kept making Jarvis pause about what a kid his age should and should not be able to do. (Normal or not, Lex was his kid, so Tony chose to be grateful instead of troubled.)

“All right, L.” Tony crouched down beside the clear crib and looked Lex in the eye. “You ready?” Lex smacked the plexiglass and Tony popped up and over the side of the crib to give Lex a kiss before he stepped onto the platform now taking up a large chunk of his lab. “OK, JARVIS. Suit up.” JARVIS murmured his agreement and machines began winding around Tony in the thousand-year-old dance of squires locking Tony’s armor into place piece by piece.

Last was the face plate. With it in his armored hand, Tony paused and winked at a wide-eyed Lex before he settled the mask into place. “JARVIS, you there?”

“At your service, Sir.” The sound came through bright and clear.

“Engage ‘Heads Up’ display.”

“Check.”

The screen lit up. “Import all preferences from home interface.”

“Will do, Sir.”

While the loading bar grew in the bottom of the screen, Tony glanced around his lab, the display caught everything his eyes focused on spewed information. His computers had 256 GB of RAM, the 1964 Shelby Cobra had a quarter tank of gas, and the tiny human was approximately 3.2 months and looking at Tony the same way he’d looked at Tony’s screwdriver earlier in the day, like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen in his short life and he wanted it.

“I have been uploaded, Sir. We’re online and ready.”

“Can we start the virtual walk around?”

“Importing preferences and calibrating virtual environment.”

“Do a check on the control surfaces.”

“As you wish.” Tony didn’t feel any puffs of air as the suit moved around him, which was good, but he did feel the weight distribution change a little as the metal stretched out piece by piece. It wasn’t enough to make him have to adjust, but it was a thing to keep in mind for mid-flight.

“Test complete.” JARVIS sounded pretty triumphant. “Preparing to power down and begin diagnostics.”

“Yeah, tell you what, do a weather and ATC check. Start listening in on ground control.”

“Sir, there are still terabytes of calculations needed before an actual flight is—”

“JARVIS, something you gotta run before you can walk.” Tony pointed at Lex, all but pressed against the wall of his crib. “Don’t repeat me on that. You’re not allowed to walk until I’ve baby-proofed the ‘bots. We ready, J?” The AI sighed. “In three, two, one,” and Tony rose gently into the air. He hovered there just long enough to give Lex a wiggle of his fingers and then tilted his feet and took off with the same glee he’d had the first time he broke the speed limit.

JARVIS was of the opinion that tiny humans could not be left alone for long, so the moment he did not need to devote all his processing power to being sure Sir was not about to plunge out of the sky, he called his other self to come sit with Alexander, who was avidly watching the display feed JARVIS was playing for him on his father’s computers.

“What is… JARVIS?”

“Sir is taking his initial test flight with the Iron Man armor.”

“With the… what?”

JARVIS brought up a holographic projection of what truly could best be described as a suit of armor. Obviously mechanical, and based on the images on the screen,  _flying,_  but still a suit of armor. “JARVIS, what is this?”

“The experiment on Sir’s table that you likened to one of Sir’s teenage boyfriends.”

“It was  _armor_?”

“Yes, Mr. Jarvis.”

“And this is what he spent all day doing? Finishing this?”

“The early afternoon was largely dedicated to programming, but yes, Sir completed the armor while discussing the finer points of engineering with the Young Sir.”

“At least his son got some interaction out of him. Was this flight scheduled?”

“No, Mr. Jarvis. Sir completed the armor this evening and was of the opinion that it should not wait.”

“Of course he didn’t.” Edwin grumbled. He plucked Alexander out of his crib and put the boy on his lap as they watched Tony defy nature through downtown Los Angeles. The snuggling was more for Edwin’s comfort than Alexander’s, comfort which rapidly became necessary when Anthony grew sure enough to fully test out the systems of his impossible suit of armor and ignored JARVIS’ warnings about experimental parameters. Edwin wanted to scold, to tell Anthony to come back to Earth under his own power, but it was beyond his ability to speak as Icarus froze instead of burned.

Anthony’s feed cut out and there was no interrupting JARVIS as he scrambled to reconnect. Edwin squeezed Alexander tight like a teddy bear and murmured, “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry, love. He’ll be fine. Tony is always fine.” Edwin knew his mouth was moving, but he lost track of when the words turned from the mindless murmuring of platitudes to prayers that Ana and Alexander’s mother might save Edwin’s son.

Anthony’s view screen flashed back with a bright flare of updating systems over the backdrop of the ground rushing ever closer. Anthony pulled up at the last moment with a triumphant cry that was nothing compared to Edwin’s choked sob. “JARVIS, I beg you, tell him to come home.”

“Sir is already en route, Other Self.”

Edwin pressed gentle kisses to Alexander’s hair, then threw them both to the ground behind the sofa when Anthony and his flying death trap came crashing through the ceiling.

Anthony damn well deserved it when DUM-E rolled over and sprayed him with the fire extinguisher.

Edwin had no words to describe how grateful he was for his much younger heart. Otherwise, the rain of keys from the now smashed piano that pattered through the hole in the ceiling would have done him in. When DUM-E had handled any potential fiery aftermath and it looked as though no more of the ceiling was going to come down, JARVIS announced, “Sir has returned home, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

Anthony’s mechanical head popped out of the debris and Edwin didn’t need to see his face to know he was flinching. “Hey, J.” Edwin lifted Alexander from the floor and rested him on his hip. “And L.”

“Anthony. An explanation, please?”

“Uh, well…” he rolled over and flopped off the crushed car like a hungover teenager. With creaking joints, he pushed himself to his feet and to a platform in the center of a circle of metal arms.

“This… isn’t what it looks like.”

“That excuse has not been effective since you were five and I found you trying to make a car from the toaster.”

“In my defense, I hadn’t studied the basics of internal combustion yet and thought that heat was what made cars run.”

“Yes, I remember that series of experiments in thermodynamics. I quite thoroughly recall the stench of burned hair.”

With now free hands, Anthony removed his helmet. “Ugh, I’m hairier now. Can you imagine how much worse that would be?”

“You fell through the ceiling, Anthony! I most certainly can!”

Alexander screeched in surprise at the shout, and before Edwin could soothe him, Anthony was off the platform and comforting them both. “Hey, hey, buddy,” he cooed. “You’re fine.” Alexander flopped against his father’s chest. Anthony dragged Edwin into a hug with his free arm. “You’re shaking, J.”

“Something large and metal ripped two holes through your house and destroyed your piano.”

“You were telling me to get rid of it yesterday.”

“I wanted you to move it or sell it, not  _crush it_  with your body.”

“I admit, crushing wasn’t the plan.”

“Plan? You’re pretending like you had a plan?”

“It’s really more of a broad outline at the moment, but it’s there.”

“Explain.”

“J—”

“Anthony.” Whatever words he might have said were drowned out by the clank of Butterfingers and U picking up scattered pieces of armor and laying them out on Anthony’s work station. They laid there like some disemboweled mechanical creature waiting for Anthony to give it life and end up like Frankenstein, murdered by his own creation. “Anthony,  _please_.”

Anthony sighed and nodded. “You’re going to want to sit down for this, J.”

“Then give me back my grandson.”

Anthony bit his lip to keep from laughing at such ridiculous words coming from such a posh voice, but pulled Jarvis onto the couch with him and put Alexander on Jarvis’ lap. “You know they wanted me to build weapons for them.”

The ‘they’ was self-explanatory. “Yes. And you built something that helped you escape.”

“Yeah. J, pull up the Mark I.” The television screen before them filled with a sketch of something that looked like a cross between a tin can and child’s toy, but Edwin could see the similarities to the armor on the table behind them. “I took the materials they gave me to make a weapon and I built the arc reactor in my chest, then I made that.”

“The primitive iteration of the armor behind us.”

“I was in a cave.”

“That wasn’t an insult to your abilities, Anthony. You miniaturized an arc reactor from scraps. You used this armor to break free?”

Anthony kept his eyes on the screen before them. “The doctor who saved me, who hooked me up to a car battery to keep the shrapnel out of my heart, his name was Yinsen.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He was funny. Not like a joker, but funny like Ana was funny, where it took a few minutes to realize that he’d been teasing. But he was fussy too. We were in a cave in the middle of the damn desert. I was dirty and sweaty all the time, and he was there with a vest on and never loosened his tie. At least, not until the end. The Ten Rings killed his family, captured him, and kept him alive to treat them and use as a translator. He performed heart surgery in the middle of a fucking cave, then talked his way into staying with me to help me build the armor.”

Tony ran a shaking hand over his son’s head. “The bastard lied to me the entire time I knew him. He told me he wanted to help me make it out so he could see his family again, but they were dead. He got himself shot getting me out.”

“He didn’t lie, Anthony. If anything, I’m sure helping you escape and knowing that you would take down the camp full of people who had killed his family gave him some measure of peace before he died.”

“Not enough. He told me about how his town was bombed out, about what the terrorists did. He knew when I was getting tired, when I started to get overwhelmed, and he’d tell me some little tidbit about them, about how the blood and dust had come together on the breeze and he could feel it on his skin.”

“I… that was a mental image I did not need, Anthony.”

“Yeah, me too.  But in terms of motivation, it got the job done.”

“And you held on to those terrible stories. You still have them bouncing around your head.”

Anthony tugged Alexander onto his lap, the babe’s eyes finally blinking shut after the night’s excitement. “He told me another story too, J. You wanna hear it?”

“Is this one more appropriate for old men and small children?”

“As appropriate as any fairy tale ever is.”

Edwin put aside all sense of decorum and snuggled down in the sofa, his side pressed against Anthony’s, and nodded that he ought to begin.

“Yinsen never started with once upon a time, like Ana used to.”

“I suppose we can let him get away with it.”

“I’m sure he’d be thrilled.” Anthony trailed off and stared down at his son. Alexander’s head was pillowed on Anthony’s shoulder and he was valiantly keeping his eyes open. “So, once upon a time – don’t tell Yinsen, but Ana is scarier – there was this prince. But the king hated the prince, so he threw him into a prison in the underworld.” Tony stroked the back of his fingers over Alexander’s forehead then traced the line of his cheeks, the way Ana had done when lulling him to sleep.

“What happened?” Edwin whispered.

“There are iron pits in hell, and this prince, he had to mine them. He did it for years until he got strong enough to crush the iron in his hands. Then the king, he realized he’d been an idiot and he should just kill the prince. So, he got his best armor and his sharpest sword and he went into hell. And the prince, he just stood there and let the king take a swing at him. But when the sword hit him, it broke. The prince was stronger than the finest sword, stronger than iron.

“Did you know my Dad got started on building shit like flying cars?” Asked Anthony before Edwin could control the thoughts of his own little prince in that cave becoming a king.

Jarvis blinked. “I vaguely recall hearing something about those, yes. Though he mentioned it after he had just bought a film studio, so I don’t recall taking him seriously.”

“Flying cars and film studios, the Stark Expo and arc reactors.” Anthony murmured. “Now that I’m a dad I’m remembering him differently. I’m remembering how exhausted he always used to look. Even if he wanted to be a dad, I’m asking myself how a man who was tired all the time would’ve managed being a good parent.”

Ah, Yinsen and his lost family must have started Anthony down this path. “Does that mean you’re intending to make peace with the Board by reducing your role in Stark Industries?”

“Half right. I’m thinking about taking over the Board and stepping back as CEO, but I can’t do that until we’ve transitioned. And more than that, how many times do you think Howard told himself that as soon as this war was over, as soon as that threat to national security was past, he was going to get back to flying cars? Or did he just… let all that go at some point?”

“He took his role in aiding the US Military very seriously, Anthony.”

“And I get that, and I’m all right with it, but how could any good scientist look at decades of war, look at the body count we’ve racked up, and not ask himself: isn’t there a better way? We’ve been bombing the hell out of people and it’s not getting better. And somehow my weapons are getting into the hands of the people we’ve been trying to stop. The cycle just goes on and on, and all I’ve got to give my kid is blood and bombs, like my father before me.”

“So you will make miniaturized arc reactors?”

“If I can figure out a way to keep people from using them to blow things up, sure. I was thinking more phones, and tablets, maybe some actual desktops. I’m going to drag Stark Industries kicking and screaming into the commercial sector.”

“But Stane controls the Board and you said he’s preaching caution.”

“I told you J, kicking and screaming. I’ve got JARVIS setting up dummy corporations and various charities, all of them buying up any loose Stark Industries stock roaming around so I can have the majority even without Obie. I’ll force them to get on board no matter how pissed they are.”

“Is that what JARVIS is designed for? Stock options? Wouldn’t Miss Potts be better suited?”

“Pepper actually has to talk to other human beings to buy up stock options, J. JARVIS could take over SI without anyone noticing.”

“How terribly Skynet of you both.”

“Thank you, Sir.” JARVIS murmured from the ceiling. Edwin really hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but matters of Stark Industries business had never been his skill. They hadn’t particularly been Howard’s skill either. Though he imagined they weren’t Anthony’s favorite, the dear boy had managed to take Stark Industries from a million-dollar company to a billion dollar one. Of course, Anthony’s charm played into it, but at some point, it had to be math.

“It was not a criticism of JARVIS’ skills. He is your child after all, and your children are capable of anything. I was simply concerned that given his traditional occupation with your engineering projects as well as running your life, now accompanied by all the extra research and worries about Alexander and helping run his life as well, engaging in a hostile purchasing against the rest of the SI board is quite a bit to ask one program to do. I simply wouldn’t want my other self to be overworked while you’re flying about in your new contraption.”

“Contraption? Come on, J. It’s too cool for 50’s lingo.”

“At this point it looks like you murdered a metal man.”

“Iron Man, J. They’re going to call him Iron Man.”

Edwin stroked his hand through Anthony’s sweaty hair has as Anthony had been mindlessly doing for his own son. “You intend to be a superhero.”

“I intend to hunt down my weapons and take them back. They’re out there killing innocent people and I’m going to stop them.”

“And you didn’t think this was a piece of information that might be useful to me?” Edwin kept his voice calm. Anthony had never responded well to shouting and Alexander would do no better.

“I was going to, but I hadn’t taken the suit out yet so I figured I’d hold off until there was actually something to report.”

“You will be issuing reports, then? Being practical about this and not just running off and flying into the sun?”

“I’m not Icarus, J. If anything, I’m Daedalus in this scenario.”

“Call yourself whatever you like so long as I don’t have to watch my son fall from the sky. Again.” Tony smirked, as though his near death an hour ago from his own hubris was nothing to worry about. “Don’t give me that smile, Anthony. I have lived long enough to know that those who consider themselves invincible are often the first ones to fall.”

“I don’t think I’m invincible, J.”

“No, you just have the same arc reactor powering the suit and protecting your heart.”

“J…”

“Please, Anthony, do try and convince me that leaving your heart exposed to all the world isn’t a structural flaw while you hold your son in your arms.”

Alexander gave a suspiciously well-timed snuggle against the arc reactor, Tony’s metaphorical heart lit up by his literal one. “You have a point.”

“Thank you for admitting as much.”

“I promise you, J, I’m not trying to get myself killed. I’ve got too much to live for.” Edwin accepted that declaration and the kiss that came with it. Anthony left with Alexander, taking the boy upstairs to bed while he coordinated suit repairs with JARVIS.

Edwin stayed right where he was, half slouched on the sofa. He ought to be thanking Alexander’s mother for whatever intervention she had done that kept Anthony alive. Or he ought to be following Anthony upstairs so he could properly scold the boy for taking off to fly around in his metal contraption when most of the city was still awake. Or he ought to be contemplating how exhausting the next 40 years of his life were going to be if he couldn’t talk Anthony back from this nonsense. But instead, he forced himself off the sofa with his young bones and went to bed, believing – falsely, as it turned out – that these matters could wait until morning.


	7. Chapter 7

It was a matter of a few hours for JARVIS to repair the suit, during which time Tony slept and fed his son his midnight meal. However, a quick check of his email before going back to bed meant Tony got an email from Christine Everhart requesting a statement about confirmed photos of the Ten Rings using Stark Industries weapons to take over a town called Gulmira.

From there, neither Lex nor Jarvis entered Tony’s thoughts. His mind focused entirely on the blood being spilled on the other side of the world in Yinsen’s own village, and Tony left to put an end to it.

Even after all these years out of the Starks’ service, Edwin was accustomed to their habits of sinking into creation to the exclusion of all else. He disliked it more when Anthony did it to his son than he did with Howard, but a new child in the house was a bit of a change and Edwin was trying to be understanding. He had spent the entirety of yesterday engineering with his child, so Edwin couldn’t fathom why he didn’t do so today, but instead of routing Anthony out of his workshop and back onto the parental schedule – which would only make Anthony dig in his heels in defiance of his own desires and self-interest – Edwin employed the same tactics he had used to get Anthony eating healthy food as a child. It would be slow and sneaky, but one day Anthony would turn around and his engineering would be on a schedule and he would be spending ample time with his son.

However, with his brand new and world-altering creation needing fine-tuning in the lab, Edwin knew it was not the day to start. Despite Alexander’s obvious dissatisfaction at Edwin being the one he spent all his time with – the boy didn’t take his eyes off the door the entire day – they went on together.

At least, they did until Edwin asked JARVIS to call Anthony out of the lab to come up and eat dinner so he didn’t collapse face first into his machinery when his blood sugar dropped. JARVIS paused, which was all the red flag Edwin could take at the moment. He demanded an answer from the AI. JARVIS only informed him that Sir was ‘out’. Edwin immediately flipped on the television and began racing through news channels to discover where Anthony had taken that iron suit of his and found himself watching the scrolling footage on CNN with a broken heart.

When Anthony finally came up from the workshop, pretending that he’d been there all day, Edwin was waiting in the living room with Alexander on his lap and a small valise beside him.

Anthony was all but skipping up the stairs as he announced, “Hey, J. Rhodey is probably going to drop by later today.”

“Because of Gulmira.”

Tony froze, then glowered at one of JARVIS’ cameras.

“He didn’t tell me, Anthony,  _CNN_  did.”

“Did they talk about the suit?”

“Not yet, but they will, I’m sure. At this point they just have breaking news banners talking about the Ten Rings being driven out of Gulmira while the US military swears to their allies that they were nowhere near the place.”

“Good, that’s good.” Anthony nodded and made his way to the wet bar that was somehow still standing beside the wreckage of the piano and the hole in the floor because Anthony had been too distracted to call a contractor and Edwin didn’t want to overstep. That was no longer a concern.

“Good? Anthony have you lost your mind!”

“I told you what I was going to do with the armor, J! I told you and you understood!”

“I understood wanting to stop arms sales and save lives! I even understood picking up your mess and wanting to undo the damage that your company has done! This is not that!”

Few things were quite so frustrating as a Stark tuning out your words to stare in the middle distance while their massive brains went someplace that wasn’t your conversation. “Oh.”

“Anthony?” Edwin darted forward, scanning him for blood.

“I haven’t picked up my mess, J.” Edwin had a bright, shining moment of hope that perhaps Anthony understood that this wasn’t the way to go about solving things, but then he looked up with that glazed expression that only came when he was engineering. “The suit I made to get out of the camp, I left it behind.”

“Anthony.”

“There’s no real circuitry in it, but if they had someone with any skill, they would be able to piece it back together and maybe replicate what I’ve done and how I made it work.”

“Anthony.”

“It won’t be very good, and powering it would be almost impossible, but it would be something.”

“Anthony!”

“Especially when footage gets out of the Iron Man armor, they might be able to make something of it.”

“ _Tony_!”

That brought him out. “You never call me Tony.”

Edwin wanted to say that he had never been so disappointed in Anthony before, but even in this moment he could not bring himself to such cruelty. “Take your son, Tony.”

Anthony scooped the glowering boy into his arms. “Did he keep you up last night, J? JARVIS said he was sleeping well.”

“Not so I can take a nap. Take him permanently.”

“J?”

“I’m leaving, Anthony.”

“You’re… what?” His voice caught.

“I cannot watch this. I  _refuse_  to watch this.”

“J, I told you what I was going to do!”

“You told me you were going to save people like your Yinsen. You made it sound like you were going to do research on where your weapons went and create a charity to help these people rebuild their lives; that you were going to send them doctors, and make them schools, and help them immigrate! I didn’t think you’d go running off at a moment’s notice in the dead of night to start blowing up terrorists! How is that not what Stark Industries was doing before?”

Never had Anthony looked so much like his father as in that moment, with rage burning bright behind his eyes. “Because the terrorists are the ones with their guns pointed at the heads of women and children.”

“And you’re going to kill them all?”

“You’re damn right I am.”

“And when Alexander comes to me and asks me why his father decided to keep making weapons, what am I to tell him?”

“That’s not what this is, J!  _You’re_  the one who taught me to clean up my messes.”

“I also taught you not to make a new one in the process! Between working on your armor and actually flying to the other end of the world to attack people, you haven’t seen your son in nearly two days.”

Anthony flinched, actually looking down at the far too displeased expression on his child’s face. “I’m not going to just—

“You have, Anthony. And worse still, do you have a plan for what happens if you get shot down in your flying suit?”

“Well tonight it was the US military shooting at me.” Anthony tried to joke.

“That makes things  _much_  better, being shot at by the only people who I am sure could actually take you down if they so chose. Good heavens, Anthony, JARVIS showed me your approach and the suit is covered in bullet holes!”

“I’m  _fine,_ Jarvis!”

“And if you were not, what do you have in place for  _your son_?” Anthony didn’t answer. “I’m waiting, Anthony. Or have you been so busy with your vengeance that you haven’t yet signed the papers Ms. Potts gave you making Alexander your heir?”

“It’s not vengeance. These are my weapons out there in the hands of terrorists. I made them. I sold them. And I had no fucking idea that anyone was using them to attack innocent people. This isn’t about me, it’s about all the damage that has been done in my name and the blood on my hands.”

“And how great a comfort that will be to your son when I tell him how you died.”

“It’s him I’m protecting, Jarvis! Who do you think the terrorists are going to come after if I leave them alone out there?”

“I rather think they will have a much easier time of it when you’re dead and you haven’t put anyone in charge of caring for your child!”

Anthony stormed back to the wet bar, but this was not a conversation to be had with a drunk Stark. Edwin had tried to lecture Stark Senior about parenting while drunk and despite being regenerated, Edwin still had the scars from broken glass.

“Do you know who will have custody of Alexander in case you get yourself shot down? Will that person just have physical custody or will they get all his shares in Stark Industries as well? Have you thought about who will control the company when you’re in the ground instead operating as CEO? Or have you gotten your lawyers prepared for the insanity that will come from the entire Board wanting access to Alexander’s shares? Or when they go to the Court and say that if you’d  _meant_  your boy to inherit the company you would have passed it on to him because you’re too clever to forget about such a thing?”

“You’ve made your point, J!” Anthony smashed his glass to the counter and though it didn’t break, the sound made Lex screech in surprise. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Anthony cuddled Lex close, only now seeming to remember that his son was still in his arms. He spent a long minute murmuring apologies into his son’s skin, hunched over and wrapped around him in a way that gave Edwin hope.

Finally, he turned back to face his accuser. “I get it. I do, but I can’t leave these weapons out there, J. I have to fix this. I can’t let these people get away with it. I can’t let people keep dying because I didn’t do enough.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

“You’re on a quest, I understand. You’ve got a world to save. But Anthony, in your desire to set things right I will not let you misplace your son. I sat idly by and let one Stark man do that already and I will not make the same mistake twice.”

“So, what do I do?”

“Have your magical suit of flying armor, but remember that you are more than weapons. Because if you don’t remember that, no one else will.”

Anthony stared at him for a long moment, as always, seeing more than Edwin meant to reveal. He tiled his head and said, “That was weird, J. You gonna tell me what happened to make you say that?”

Edwin sighed. “The injunction was delivered while you were out.”

“Yeah, J told me while I was en route as an FYI. That’s not what’s got you riled.”

“It is not enough to know you nearly died tonight and I wouldn’t have had the chance to say goodbye?”

“J,” Tony stepped closed. “I’m not aiming to get killed, here.”

“No one ever does, Anthony.”

“I’m not suicidal, Jarvis. I’m going to do my best to come home and actually  _be here_  when I’m here. I… L is just a baby. I’ve had him for a day and even though I didn’t ask for him I can’t imagine treating him the way Howard treated me. I was a kid. I was a little shit, but I was still a kid. You’ve been telling me for years that Howard being an ass was all on him and wasn’t about me, and I think this might be the first time I actually believe you. I can’t imagine putting all that shit on Lex. I’m still pretty damn sure that I have no idea what I’m doing, but I can at least try. I want to make the world a better place for him, honestly better, not just richer.”

And there it was. He claimed such terrible skill with other people and yet Anthony knew precisely what fears were eating Edwin. He could not say whether it was his worst fear that Anthony might die, or that somewhere along the way he would evolve into Howard and Edwin would be granted a new life just to watch history repeat itself as he failed again. “I will never be able to excuse some of the things Howard did to you, Anthony, and I apologize if you ever thought I was trying to.”

“He was your friend, J, I get that.”

“You were my boy. I should have done better by you. And now that I can, I will do better. Both for you, and for your son.”

“No matter what some of the whispers like to say, Howard wasn’t that terrible. He just – now that I’m sitting here with my kid, I’m pretty sure that he wanted an heir and didn’t think about all the child raising that had to come with that. He didn’t know what to with a kid, and we Starks don’t like being bad at something. And let’s not lie, it’s not like it was a time when he could’ve gone to a therapist for parenting help. Even now that probably would’ve damaged his business.”

“Better his business than his son.”

“That’s why I’ve got J seeing if he could bribe or blackmail any of the therapists you’ve got him looking at who seem good.”

Edwin refused to be embarrassed by JARVIS ratting him out. “Yes, the ability to keep one’s mouth shut is probably of more value than raw talent. But Anthony, perhaps you should let JARVIS conduct his search and speak with a therapist  _before_ you go flying off into the blue?” Edwin’s voice cracked.

“I can do that. I can be better, J. I just… I have to…”

“I  _know_. Anthony, I know.” Edwin cradled Anthony’s face between his palms. “I know that if you want to save the world, and run your company, and protect these people, and take care of your son, you can do all of that. You just… you have to decide. It can no longer be a matter of leaving it up to everyone else. You want Stark Industries to stop selling weapons, then  _make them_. Don’t rely on Stane to do it for you. You want the people in that bombed out town to have lives free of terrorism, make it happen.” Tony opened his mouth to counter that that was precisely what he’d been doing, but Edwin pressed on. “You know how to repair machines, not people. Make a charity, talk to the diplomats, read some studies. Stark Industries has tried bombing people into submission for decades, try something else, as you said.”

Anthony gave a gentle nod of his head, careful to agree but not to dislodge Jarvis’ touch. “I can do that.”

“You’re Tony Stark. You can do anything. But first, may I recommend I prepare breakfast for you while you call your counsel.”

“Counsel and Pepper. I’ll need them both if I’m going to get this done.”

“Even better.”

@@@@@

“What’s got you so excited, Cheese?”

Phil Coulson had been told by several reliable sources that thanks in no small part to his bland expression they had been convinced he was a Life Model Decoy instead of a real boy. Nick Fury, however, didn’t have that problem. Fury liked to pretend it was natural ability, but in truth he had known Coulson so long they’d both still had hair when it started, and some things were just a matter of time. So, while everyone else roaming the halls of SHIELD thought Phil Coulson looked no different than any other day, Fury caught how Phil kept glancing down at his stack of papers to check on them and make sure they weren’t a figment of his imagination.

“The US Air Force made contact with an unidentified flying object over Gulmira, Afghanistan.”

“Before or after something started blowing up terrorists?”

“After.”

“And that little grin you’ve got means you think it’s the same UFO spotted over LA yesterday?”

“According to reports from people who caught good sightings in LA it was a flying man, not an object.”

“UFM, then.”

Coulson ignored the joke. “The audio from the Air Force flight recorders also identifies the bogey by saying,” Coulson paused to flip open the folder and read notes that he absolutely didn’t need to, “‘it looks like a man.’”

Nick stiffened. “Show me.”

Coulson set his phone on the desk and tapped play. There was two seconds of white noise from a flying jet before the engagement started, just enough time for Coulson to flick open his folder and lay down the few photos from LA snagged from cell phones and satellite footage over Afghanistan.

The photos were blurry, but coupled with the panicked voices of Air Force personnel and the flying metal suit coming back to save a pilot, it was convincing. “What in the hell, Cheese? Do we have a guy who can turn into metal and fly?”

“I think it’s just as likely that we have a mechanical genius in LA who can build a flying metal suit.

Fury stared at him. “You think it’s Stark?”

“I think it’s a better explanation than a naturally-occurring flying metal man.”

“Given some of the shit we’ve seen, I think it’s more likely that we’ve got another lab experiment gone awry than Tony Stark having enough backbone to fly into Afghanistan and attack terrorists.”

“I think PTSD has manifested itself in stranger ways than that. I also think that James Rhodes was standing in the Air Force Middle Eastern Command at that moment and it was his recommendation that they not target the bogey.”

Fury leaned back in his chair. “His justification?”

“They didn’t know what they were shooting at.”

“Which they didn’t.”

“As the Commander pointed out, it had already taken out one Raptor. Shooting was the logical option.”

“So, you think Rhodes tried to call them off because  _Tony Stark_  was in this flying metal suit?”

“I think that if Colonel Rhodes hadn’t been in Middle Eastern Command surrounded by witnesses, I would guess Stark built the suit and Rhodes was the pilot.”

“I don’t like guessing, Cheese.”

Phil didn’t roll his eyes, but Fury saw it anyway, just like Nick didn’t give an order, but Coulson heard it anyway.


	8. Chapter 8

Whatever Tony had meant to do – and yes, he might have gotten a little distracted from calling Pepper by working on the bullet holes in the suit, but this was a critical skill Lex needed to know – everything fell by the wayside when Rhodey called.

“Let it ring through, J.”

“Do you intend to ignore all conversation with the outside world on matters that you promised you would handle?” Jarvis said, and really, Tony didn’t like that he couldn’t tell if that was the tone Jarvis had used on Tony when he was being a bratty teenager or if it was the tone he’d used on Howard.

“I don’t have anything to tell him!” Tony objected.

“Colonel Rhodes is cursing into his phone and telling me to, and I quote, make Tony pick the damn thing up.” JARVIS announced.

“Feel free to tell him that I’m working on something and can’t come to the phone right now.”

There was another pause, during which Jarvis just stood there with his arms crossed.

“Colonel Rhodes is using his reasonable voice, Sir. He is currently attempting to persuade me to relay a message to you presently rather than wait until you have completed your work.”

“Putting it off will only make matters more difficult, Anthony.”

“He knows I was in the suit, J. I told him so.”

“Yes, when you were capitalizing on your friendship to keep the US Air Force from shooting a bomb at you.”

“Which they did anyway.”

“That was entirely beyond Colonel Rhodes’ control and not something you can blame him for, as you well know.”

“What Rhodey doesn’t know, the military can’t drag out of him, which you know.”

“I am sure he would agree to keep silent on all matters, not just your son and proprietary technology.”

“Rhodey can’t talk to me about stopping weapons production without it turning into a screaming match, J. I doubt he’s going to turn sympathetic with the Iron Man armor.”

“A secret that is now out of your hands thanks to yesterday’s recklessness. Delaying him will only make matters worse. If Middle Eastern Command chose to drag Colonel Rhodes in for a consult on your armor at the first sighting, you can’t imagine that they’ve suddenly chosen not to interrogate him on the subject with the passage of time.”

Tony sighed and stepped away from the keyboard. The last thing he wanted to do was get irritated with Rhodey and start smashing keys. “Point, J. Let him through.”

“—and you know what’ll happen then, JARVIS!” Rhodey’s voice came bursting over the speakers.

“What’ll happen when, Rhodey-bear?”

As always, Rhodes’ silence managed to echo through the room, all the more impressive when his displeasure was coming through JARVIS’ speakers. “Couldn’t have told me that you’d put me through, JARVIS?”

“Pardon me, Colonel. Your arguments were so persuasive that I chose to act upon them immediately.”

“That’s a lot of sass for a computer program.”

“I shall take that as a compliment to Sir’s coding abilities.”

“You are absolutely a product of Tony’s influence. What in the hell was that, Tones?”

“Test flight.”

“A  _person suit_  test flight?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“The pilots have already come in and given their statements, Tones. They’ve said it looked like a person, which matches the statements we’ve gotten from people on the ground in Gulmira about the suit of armor that flew in and shot the hell out of some terrorists.”

“Well that’s interesting.”

Tony could hear Rhodey pacing back and forth, restraining himself from cursing. It said something about their friendship that Tony knew the quality of silence meant Rhodey was counting to ten. He could just imagine his best friend out on the grounds of the base somewhere, having abandoned his office with whatever listening devices or eavesdroppers there might be so he could interrogate Tony in the privacy of a parking lot. “Don’t bullshit me, Tony. You already told me it was you. You can’t take that back.”

Rhodey’s objections about truth, justice, and the American way were drowned out for a moment by a test flight zipping by overhead, and that was the end of the conversation.

Rhodey was on base. That’s all it was. And jets flying overhead and a missile coming in for landing didn’t even sound the same. If anyone in the world knew the difference between the acoustics of their propulsion systems, it was Tony Stark. But coming through the speaker on Rhodey’s tinny little phone, Tony’s brain couldn’t tell the difference. Tony tried to reel himself in, tried to say it wasn’t his brain’s fault, it was the phone’s. He could build a better phone. One where it sounded like the person was standing right next to you. He could build a phone that didn’t have the blur that made everything sound the same so you couldn’t tell the difference between jet engines and afterburn.

“Anthony.” Jarvis’ soft hands stroking through his hair broke through Tony’s spiral. Though, judging by the frigid temperature, the jazz JARVIS had playing low, and Rhodey’s murmured suggestions to the people actually in the room, it had taken them a minute to bring him around.

Tony gulped and forced himself back to his feet. “What happened?”

Despite being the only one not in the room, Rhodey said, “You had a flashback, Tones.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You just collapsed, Sir.”

“It wasn’t like I was there, J. I knew I was here, and I knew it was a jet I could hear on Rhodey’s phone, not a missile.”

“Anthony, you collapsed anyway.” Jarvis helped him back to his feel and bit his tongue when Tony went for one of this workshop chairs instead of the couch.

“Knowing doesn’t mean it didn’t scare the shit out of me.”

“Involuntary memories are a sign of PTSD, Sir.”

“I don’t think that’s what it was.”

“Tones, the Jarvises and I aren’t medical professionals. JARIVS can read every article every written on PTSD, Junior can make you tea, and I can guess from what I’ve seen before, but that’s not the same as someone whose job it is to diagnose this shit. I know you don’t want to, but you need to talk to a professional.”

Tony reached out and put a shaking hand on Jarvis’ shoulder. The poor guy looked all kinds of thrown that Rhodey was talking about him like young Jarvis was a regular part of their lives – apparently original Jarvis’ son – and Tony wasn’t helping. “Did you know that the second time he called me after Afghanistan, Jarvis told me to talk to someone about what happened?”

“Jarvis is a smart man.” Jarvis straightened his spine and ran his hand through Tony’s hair, the change in age making it no less soothing.

The first time Tony had called Jarvis after Afghanistan, he’d been fresh off a military cargo plane and in the car on the way to get a hamburger. He’d still been manic enough with relief that everyone in his life had just let him ramble because to do anything else would feel ungrateful. While the rest of them had waited at least a week before mentioning therapists, Edwin Jarvis had no time for delicacy. Tony wondered how Lex’s mom had filled in that part of their memories, what the world thought had happened to Edwin Jarvis to get Edwin Jarvis, Jr standing here.

“Do you want me to hunt down some recommendations?” Rhodey asked, oblivious to miasma of panic giving way to guilt in Tony’s stomach.

“JARVIS is on it.”

“Your AI reading reviews is only going to be able to tell you so much, Tones.”

“Reading reviews, their entire published body of work, any statements they have made about the US military, weapons operations, or Sir in particular, as well as discerning any information in their background that might lead to blackmail or outright threats, as well as indicators about their ability to withstand such treatment, Colonel Rhodes.” JARVIS replied.

“I think you might have insulted him, Rhodey-bear.”

“Computer programs do not get insulted, Sir.”

If you’ll excuse us, Colonel, I believe Sir needs to rest.” The AI hung up on his objections.

“You know, he’s just going to turn up at the front door now.”

“How convenient that I control that as well, Sir.” That was actually pretty comforting.

“Come sit down on the couch, Anthony.”

“I’m sorry, J.”

“Panic attacks aren’t something to apologize for.”

“Not that.”

“Whatever you choose to call it—”

“Not the freak out, J. The… you’re not you anymore.”

Jarvis ignored Tony’s objections to wrap his arm around Tony’s waist and haul him to his feet. “Of course I am.”

“But you’re not.” Tony dragged them to a stop and made Jarvis look at him. “You’re Jarvis Junior now. I meant to make you documents, forge your existence, not… whatever in the hell her magic did.”

“It’s fine, Anthony.”

“No, it’s not!” Tony shoved off the touch trying to get him moving again. “What does the world think happened? Do they think you’re dead? Did you just vanish into thin air? And where did Junior come from?”

“Tony, Tony.” Jarvis put his hands on Tony’s shoulders. “These are all good questions that I’m sure my Other Self can find the answers for, but you need to calm down.”

“I don’t, Jarvis! You don’t exist anymore!”

Jarvis threw aside all their usual protocol for dealing with one another and wrapped Tony in a bear hug. It shouldn’t have been so comforting from such a lean guy, but Jarvis smelled the same way he had when Tony was young. He felt too big for his own body wrapped up in those arms, but the scent, it was like coming home and the rush of terror and guilt leaving Tony’s body made him want to sob in relief. “I’m sorry, J. I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, my boy. It is a gift to be given more time. No father in the world would say otherwise. Learning a new life story is a small price to pay.”

“But it’s still a price.”

“Such is life, Anthony.”

“Sirs, I must interrupt.”

“We’re kind of having a moment here, JARVIS,” Tony said with his face buried in Jarvis’ throat.

“Da-da!” Both men froze. “Da-da!”

“Fuck.” Ever so slowly both men turned to the crib and found Lex standing on his own two feet when ten minutes ago he couldn’t sit upright. His hands were wrapped around the top of the crib and the was onesie uncomfortably tight around his fat little body while he expressed his displeasure at being excluded from the hugs with the one word he knew.

“JARVIS?”

“I believe the Young Sir can be placed at nine months.”

“How… when?”

“I do not believe—”

“ _When_ , JARIVS.”

“Discernable growth started the moment you hit the floor, Sir.”

“Well, fuck. J, call the therapist.”


	9. Chapter 9

Stanley Keyworth had never been more uncomfortable in his life. Considering he’d spent his career in war zones and once been subjected to a Secret Service background check that required an evaluation from another psychiatrist so incompetent Stanley actually feared for the future of democracy and his profession, that was saying something. Stanley was self-aware enough to know why he was standing in the absolute middle of foyer with his hands in his pockets. Somehow a Mr. Jarvis had gotten ahold of Stanley’s federal background check, run one more thorough than the US government, then gotten himself on Stanley’s schedule for the day. Mr. Jarvis had called to grill him about his approaches to various conditions and thoughts on work done by fellow psychiatrists with names and specific details that had never been published so a guy outside of the rooms where the opinions had been spoken shouldn’t know about them. If Stanley wasn’t too curious for his own good, he would’ve hung up around minute ten of Mr. Jarvis verbally writhing through his psyche.

(He did call up a former Presidential Chief of Staff he’d worked with in the past so if he went missing, they’d know what he’d been up to. The guy had said he’d gotten his own call from Mr. Jarvis as a reference, and if he was right, this would probably be the most important gig of Stanley’s life. Thank goodness Stanley was a professional or that would have thrown him off his game.)

However, Stanley had hung on, and after several days of silence he’d had an abrupt phone call from Mr. Jarvis and a car turn up outside of his practice. He spent the drive reading and signing non-disclosure documents so he could be standing here, in the foyer of Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion, asking himself if he’d done something really wrong or really right with his life that this was how it had turned out.

“Dr. Keyworth, thank you for waiting.”

Stanley twisted away from what he was pretty damn sure was an original Jackson Pollock hanging on the entryway hall like other people had cheap stuff from Home Goods. He was met by a tall gentleman, every inch of him perfectly poised and pressed.

“It was no trouble… Mister?”

“Edwin Lawrence Jarvis, Jr. I am personal valet to Mr. Stark.” He held out his thin hand and Stanley shook it.

“I’m pleased to meet you after that grilling I received, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Oh, that was not me, Dr. Keyworth.”

“No? There’s another Mr. Jarvis here? Mr. Jarvis, Senior?”

“Technically I might be considered Mr. Jarvis the Third. It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Keyworth.” A slightly different Mr. Jarvis’ voice came from the ceiling. Stanley startled and looked around, but there were no visible speakers.

“Uh, and you Mr. Jarvis? Are you… watching me through security cameras?”

“In a manner of speaking. I am Mr. Stark’s AI.”

“An AI?”

“An Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Keyworth.”

“Yeah, no, I got that part, I just… I can barely stand to deal with the AI on my phone. All that conversation and I never would’ve guessed that you weren’t…”

“Human, Dr. Keyworth. It is not insulting to state a fact. I am not human. I am an AI. I was crafted by Mr. Stark and thus am the most advanced AI the world has ever known, but still, I am a computer program.”

“Well, you’re a very good one.”

“Thank you, Dr. Keyworth.”

The other Mr. Jarvis stood there with a little grin on his face while Stanley spoke to the ceiling. “Can I ask why I got grilled by the world’s most advanced AI before I had a car turn up outside of my house to bring me here without a moment to doubt my life choices?”

“You’re a trauma specialist, Dr. Keyworth.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know exactly why you’re here.”

Stanley had been scolded by  _Presidents_  and he didn’t feel nearly as upset by their disapproval as he did by this man’s, but Stanley stuck to his guns. “I can make a good guess, but I’d still like to hear it.”

“Because I spent four months captured by terrorists.” The words stalled in Stanley’s brain. Not only had Tony Stark emerged from nowhere, still in the safety of his living room but now in Stanley’s sight line, but more, there was a baby on his hip. “And I’d like to not have a panic attack about water boarding when I give my son a bath.”

“Well… that sounds like a pretty good reason. Does that mean you weren’t going to talk to a therapist if you didn’t need to for him?”

“Does it matter?”

“A little bit. It’ll change how we approach things, and make me feel better about the amount of digging you had your AI do into everything I’ve ever done wrong in my life.”

“Yeah, JARVIS doesn’t really understand privacy.”

“Mr. Stark, I’m pretty sure I’m one of a handful of people in the world who even know your son exists. I’d be protective over the ones who got that information too.”

Tony stared at him for a long moment and Stanley didn’t flinch under the attention. “Well, come on then.” Tony cocked his head and headed through the living room, which Stanley noted didn’t have any sign of the child. He didn’t think that was down to the maid’s cleaning skills. No, as Stark handed off the baby to the human Mr. Jarvis, Stanley backtracked. There was no maid in this house. Anything that couldn’t be done by Mr. Jarvis was done by JARVIS, or by robots he controlled. Stanley wouldn’t have been surprised if Stark had his own roombas that vacuumed the floor and drones that dusted the shelves.

Despite the baby in his arms, Mr. Jarvis waved them both to the balcony, and raised an eyebrow at Stark’s hesitation before he rolled his eyes and went. Stanley gave him a nod of gratitude, because he was damn sure that Stark would’ve gone for the wet bar instead, and no therapy had ever been helped by flirting with alcoholism.

The balcony held the first signs of the baby. Not in any actual toys, but there was a springy material on the balcony’s floor and plenty of trees in planters to protect from too much sun. Stark leaned against the nearly invisible plexiglass in between him and the ocean. Stanley debated for a moment, then settled on one of the lounge chairs with the hope Stark might appreciate spunk. “Why outside?”

“I had a panic attack at the sound of planes going overhead on a phone call. JARVIS has been researching potential triggers and telling everyone about them. They keep opening the windows like the smell of the ocean is going to keep me from freaking out.”

That the Pacific Ocean was as far away as possible from a desert cave in Afghanistan didn’t need to be stated. “That’s kind of them. Though usually there’s usually a major trigger that you can learn to avoid or control.”

“Thank fuck, because I do all my work inside and the windows in my lab don’t open.”

“Is Mr. Jarvis the one who keeps opening windows?”

“He and JARVIS.”

“How do you distinguish between the two of them?” Because Stanley was certain that Tony Stark didn’t go around calling his butler ‘Mr. Jarvis.’

“One of them is a computer and the other is flesh and blood.” Stark said in the sarcastic tone of a man tired of answering that question.

“I mean when you’re talking to them in the same room. Metaphorically.” Stanley shrugged.

“They just know. You’re not here to grill me about my AI.” Stark buried his hands in his pockets.

“No.”

“So why are you asking me about him?” Despite how easy Stark claimed it was, it took Stanley a moment to realize the ‘he’ was the AI, not the human.

“Because the way you talk about him tells me a lot about you.”

“Do you need to know that?”

“Do I need to know things about you before I try and help you?” Stanley used a tone that would’ve been worthy of Stark.

“You’re a trauma specialist. That’s why you’re here.”

Stanley raised an eyebrow. “Not just that, though.”

Stark wet his bottom lip and probably ran through more variables in that moment than Stanley could compute in a day. “No. Not just that.”

“Mr. Stark—”

“Tony.”

“All right, Tony.” Stanley swung his legs back to the ground and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. “I assume that you know exactly who am I and what I do.”

“I wouldn’t have let you in my house if I didn’t know more about you then you ever wanted anybody to know.”

“Do you know or does your AI?”

“Does it matter?”

“Usually there’s a benefit to having a certain distance between a therapist and their patient. Something like the comfort of strangers. When we only see people in one space and in one situation, we forget that they exist in the world outside and feel comfortable speaking with them about details we wouldn’t share otherwise.”

“You think that would work here?”

“I think that you appreciate every bit of power you can possibly have over this situation. I just don’t know if that’s in your best interests.”

“JARVIS did his research.”

“On me?”

“On everything. He could give you a lecture on the history of psychiatry, tell you about current treatment methods, scientific data on their efficacy, how to determine which methods might be the best for any particular patient, and yeah, JARVIS knows about psychiatric ethics.”

“So he told you to bring me in for a consult without telling you anything about me and you accepted it?” That was a hell of a lot of trust to place in a computer program.

“Oh no, J told me all sorts of things about you, just not the stuff I wouldn’t have been able to find from Googling or making a few phone calls.”

“It must be interesting to be the kind of man who considers calling a former Presidential Chief of Staff just a ‘few phone calls.’”

“In some ways. In others, it means that I have to drag people out of their homes before they have a chance to talk to someone so I can preserve my privacy.”

“Which is why I started asking you questions about your AI.”

“To see if I would tell you about proprietary technology?”

“How much did it just hurt you to refer to JARVIS as ‘propriety technology’?”

“Instead of what?”

“Him. Or J. Or whatever dozen nicknames you have for him.”

“Tell me, Doc, what does it mean that I personify my tech?”

“It means you’re not just making things; you’re creating them.”

“We just met, Doc. That’s third date kind of talk.”

“How often do you make it to third dates, Tony?”

“Often enough.”

“Now, why don’t I believe that?”

“Because you assume that famous playboys don’t ever have long-term relationships.”

“You said you were so concerned about your privacy that I had to be spirited away from my house on my day off. Inviting people into your bed is more private than inviting them to your living room.”

“You say that only because you haven’t been in my bedroom.”

“It is just as sterile as everyplace else here?”

Tony flinched. “It was.”

“And then what happened?” Tony didn’t answer. “Let me ask it a different way: why aren’t there any signs of your son in this house?”

“Because Stark Industries filed an injunction against me.” Tony lurched off the railing and started pacing.

“And you think that means someone is going to turn up at your house unexpectedly, so you want to keep your son’s existence concealed.”

“I just got back from being held by terrorists, Doc. Forgive me for keeping him off their radar as long as possible.”

“But you didn’t just get back, you’ve been back for months.”

“So, I’m supposed to be better now?” Tony spat.

“I don’t think Afghanistan is the problem.”

“You’ve got me diagnosed already, do you?”

“Tony, I diagnosed you the second I saw your son.”

Tony paused, but didn’t look at Stanley. “PTSD.”

“Which you probably could have powered through with all your electronic creations, surrounded in the safety net of your artificial children who sneak in therapeutic controls. But that flesh and blood kid, the one you can’t backup to a separate server to protect him from everything scary in the world, he messed things up. You’ve probably had a mental break cooking since the first time you looked at him after you got back.”

“I’ve only known about him for a few days.”

“That’s both better and worse.”

“How?”

“Better because hasn’t been triggering you for months while you’ve been ignoring it. That would take some time to unwind. Worse, because you snapped pretty quick.”

“I’m doomed then?” Tony tried to tease.

“Nope. You let JARVIS call in reinforcements after the first sign of trouble instead of trying to force your way through and pretend everything was normal. That path only leads to doing something you’d regret.”

“Like what?”

“Like spending a few years screaming at your kid and making him feel like it’s all his fault.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“You wouldn’t mean to. But you believe in control, Tony. You have all the money and fame in the world, and even better, all the brains too. You can bend the world to your will and make anything happen just because you want it.” Stanley gave his speech to Tony’s back. The man was hunched over the railing and looking at the ocean instead of the world behind him.

“But then all that control got stripped away by psychopaths who live in a cave. That’s the kind of thing that breaks even the best and brightest the world has to offer. But instead, you blew up a terrorist camp and saved yourself when the entire might of the US military-industrial complex couldn’t do it. Even more, I’d be willing to bet every dollar I have that you had something to do with the attack that happened on those same terrorists yesterday.”

“You’re going to have to sign some more forms before we talk about that.” Tony’s voice was hoarse.

“Frankly, I’m not sure I want to know. You’re a man who seizes control from the jaws of death and chaos, who has so much control that you manage to project precisely the image you want. Despite several sex tapes and who knows how many hit pieces, you are the backbone and crown prince of one of the most profitable companies in the world. You created a  _person_ out of zeroes and ones, and you took out a terrorist cell before the UN found its socks in the morning. You’re Tony Stark, and there’s nothing Tony Stark can’t do.

“Except, now you’ve got this squishy little creation you can’t control.”

“I don’t want to control my kid.”

“In future appointments we’ll be having a long talk about the fact and fiction of Howard Stark, but right you know full well that I mean you can’t protect him.”

“Hell yes, I can.” Tony whirled around, and with the fire in his eyes, Stanley absolutely believed him.

“Not forever. The world is going to have to know about your son at some point. And despite everything you’ve done to maintain your privacy despite getting followed everywhere by cameras, they’re going to want to know everything about him too. You were on the cover of  _Time Magazine_  at eight. He’s going to be stalked by paparazzi for the rest of his damn life. That must be your own version of hell.”

“It was hell… six months ago.”

“And now hell has a whole new flavor of terrible. You dead and your son carrying on his grandfather’s war.”

“So, Doc, what do I do?”

“Tell them to go fuck themselves.” Stanley shrugged.

Stanley took Tony’s flinch of a smile as progress. “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to talk like that.”

“Now you know why your AI picked me. Kids are the best kind of chaos. You want to let your kid grow up to be whatever kind of chaos he wants, to just enjoy the ride and not try and force him to be anything other than what he is. So, let him be the chaos and fulfill your need to make order with everything else.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be prescribing me an anti-anxiety med and lecturing me on deep breathing?”

“You wouldn’t take whatever I prescribed, and don’t you worry, we’ll get to techniques for handling PTSD attacks, but right now we’re talking about your new life picture.”

“And that’s to create order from chaos?”

“That’s what you’ve always done. I figure that before the kid you liked a certain amount of chaos in your personal life so you could have something to inspire you. You probably worked all hours of the night, ate whenever Mr. Jarvis insisted, and got a rush from thumbing your nose at the establishment.”

“If you tell me I can’t thumb my nose at people, we’re going to have problems.”

“No, go for it, just think about thumbing them in a planned way instead of when the mood strikes. You’re going to get all the chaos you can handle from raising a kid, so the parts of your life where you used to embrace the chaos need to get more orderly to balance things out. If you keep working through the night and staying off a schedule, it’s going to damage you as a parent.”

“I feel like I’ve heard people getting lectured about this before.”

“For you, it’s critical. You find chaos necessary to your creative process. You like to ride the wave of it and come out the other side with something brilliant. However, the chaotic wave to be ridden is now your son. If you keep to your old patterns at the same time as you’re trying to parent, you’re going to end up being what you determine to be an insufficient father.”

“Is there some kind of uniform standard of insufficiency?”

“When in the hell have you ever adhered to uniform standards of anything? Anything less than throwing yourself into fatherhood with everything you have is going to be insufficient for you. You’ll hate yourself for it and soon enough we won’t be having conversations about PTSD anymore.”

“Are you going to tell me what to do about the PTSD?”

“This is about the PTSD. I’ll give JARVIS some things to watch out for and to try so he can update me for our next appointment, but you’re not getting panic attacks from the sound of planes or too much heat, they’re from feeling out of control. If you don’t make order where you can, pretty soon every time your kid cries you’re going to have a panic attack. Then you’ll feel like a failure for the attack, and you’ll just dig yourself into a deeper psychological hole. You and the Jarvises who control your life need to get that sorted first.”

“JARVIS is listening.”

“I figured. But it’s rude not to pay attention to a person when you’re talking to them.”

“So JARVIS gets to be in charge of my mental health?”

“He and Mr. Jarvis.” Stanley nodded. “They’ll collate data for me on how your PTSD is presenting and we’ll talk about some methods for coping next time. What I want  _you_  to think about is turning everything that used to be chaos into order and letting your kid be the chaos. If you can manage to not actually start working on it, which I doubt, I’d like you to make me a list of the things that are stressing you out the most right now and ways you might be able to fix them.” Tony didn’t respond. “I assume from your silence you’re already working on that.” Tony just shrugged. “Right, well, don’t tear down civilization and rebuild it in your image until after our next appointment. That might be too much chaos for any breathing techniques.”


	10. Chapter 10

Tony probably should’ve taken a nap after the first conversation with his therapist, but he figured that if the mental health professional thought it was all right for him to go full Tony Stark, he might as well. Instead, he told JARVIS to find out what Pepper needed to do an end run around the injunction and get it to her, and told Jarvis to tell him where all the baby shit hanging out in his lab and hidden in boxes was actually supposed to go.

He may have taken a moment of privacy to murmur to JARVIS that he wanted a check in with APOLLO and gotten told that neither AI was yet ready to disclose their findings. That meant they’d found something objectively terrible but didn’t have enough proof to satisfy their processors. That thought sparked Tony’s first deep breathing treatment of the day and a group lecture on muscle relaxation techniques from a guy who didn’t have muscles. It was more the thought of JARVIS ordering Tony to lay down on the living room floor and coaching him through ‘unclenching’ than it was the actual process of conscious relaxation that did anything for Tony’s anxiety. JARVIS made a note and said he had a whole list of things they could try. Tony chose to take than as encouraging.

Apparently one of the techniques for dealing with anxiety was distraction, because three seconds after Tony said thinking about releasing tension in his feet wasn’t doing anything for him, Jarvis set Lex on Tony’s stomach and JARVIS connected a call to Pepper.

(In about a week and half Stanley would explain to Tony that muscle relaxation wasn’t working for Tony because a chunk of his anxiety came from the arc reactor in his chest. Though releasing tension in his lower back and shoulders would make the reactor more comfortable, it didn’t make the weight or the ache in his ribs go away.)

Tony was grateful for his kid drawing spit lines across the surface of the arc reactor with his plastic screwdriver since otherwise the conversation with Pepper and his lawyers would maybe have been the worst conversation he’d ever had. (Even the solid minute it took to get Truman – the new lawyer – on topic because he was too busy fanboying over Tony wasn’t any fun when Tony knew what was coming.)

Stark Industries’ in-house counsel had filed the injunction on behalf of the Board and had it hand delivered to Tony’s mansion and Tony’s usual personal lawyer, Ms. Sharma. She’d been warned by Pepper about what was coming and had no qualms admitting she was better suited to striking down paternity claims, blackmail attempts, and illicit photos than she was at handling hostile takeovers. (At least, handling the legal aspect of hostile takeovers. If Tony didn’t have AIs on it, she would absolutely be the person he had pointed at the Board.)

Between Pepper, Sharma and Harper – the beautiful nerd who handled Tony’s intellectual property – they chose a guy one firm over to handle the injunction. Neither Truman nor his firm had dealings with Stark Industries (Pepper’s requirement); he’d done this kind of litigation before and done it well (Harper’s concern); and he was smart enough to realize he was putting on a front and this matter wouldn’t be handled in a courtroom (Sharma).

“The Preliminary Injunction Hearing is scheduled for the end of the week, Mr. Stark. If you were in New York it wouldn’t have even been that long but the judge was merciful about you actually needing to schedule a flight to come in.”

“Your in-house counsel objected that you have your own plane and could be there today if you wanted,” Sharma added, “but the judge agreed that given the potential consequences to the company of even a  _temporary_  Restraining Order, he could give you a few days to gather enough information to mount your defense.”

“Well isn’t that sweet.”

“It really was, Mr. Stark.” All right, Truman had a bit more of a backbone than Tony gave him credit for. “Your best defense for this Hearing is going to be presenting the judge with your new, peace-friendly growth plan that would soothe all the Board’s worries if they weren’t in the military’s pockets. That’s the angle. You’ve been doing everything in your power to change SI’s direction and objectively it’s all a good idea, the Board just doesn’t have the vision to see it.”

“Pepper has been trying to tell us that you’re hesitant to share the details of such a plan, which I assume means you don’t have a plan?” Sharma said. It sounded like a question, but it really wasn’t.

“Broad strokes.”

Tony didn’t even need to have the video chat turned on to know all the lawyers were glancing at one another in bafflement that Tony hadn’t managed to run SI into the ground yet. “I hate to say it, Mr. Stark, but a judge won’t appreciate broad strokes as much as a solid growth chart. I can work with it, but there’s more chance of losing. Your biggest selling point against the Board’s complaints is that you’re Tony Stark. I’d like to bring in at least two therapists who are willing to testify you’re in your right mind and some financial experts who can say that despite only having broad strokes, those strokes are going in the right direction. But that means Ms. Potts is going to have to present your strokes to someone who can testify to that effect.”

“Or, Stark could just hand over a prototype of whatever not-bomb he’s been working on in that mad scientist’s lab of his and this will take five minutes and shut down any future attempts at a takeover.”

“Not necessarily,” Truman said, “but Ms. Sharma is right that that would be helpful.”

“You’re not going to tell me to make some concessions to get them to withdraw the Injunction?”

Truman paused. “I’m lawyer, Mr. Stark. It’s my job to help you—”

“He wants Pepper to give him permission to start Discovery on justifiable cause to expel every member of the Board.” Tony could visualize Sharma leaning into the speakerphone and glowering at Truman for dancing around it.

“I was getting there!”

“Tony likes honesty. Even if he disagrees with it, he’d rather hear the truth.”

“All right, honesty.” Truman snapped. “You may be a high-functioning alcoholic, a manwhore, and likely suffering from crippling PTSD, but you’re still Tony Stark. You’re Midas. And even if you weren’t, I’d want to ruin them all for treating you this way after everything you’ve been through. If they’re unwilling to show human compassion, they don’t deserve any.”

Tony let the pause hang for a long moment before Truman murmured, “Too much honesty?”

“No,” Pepper finally spoke, “Tony has just decided to tell you the truth.”

Truman’s demand of “What truth?” ran over Sharma’s objections to being lumped in with the new kid. Sharma’s voice came in clear when she went after Harper and demanded to know why he wasn’t furious. “What would you tell  _Harper_ that you wouldn’t tell me?”

Lex chose that opportune moment to chuck his plastic screwdriver across the room and shout, “Da, da-da, da!” Tony recognized the irritation at tech not doing what he wanted, but still stood up to get him a bottle. (Tony was thinking about medicating his own irritation with milk instead of whiskey. Lex seemed to enjoy it.)

Dead silence rang out from the other end of the line.

“Mr. Stark… what was that?” Of course, Truman was the one asking. Pepper was Lex’s aunt, Harper had handled the paternity paperwork, and Sharma had sense.

“That’s my kid, Truman.”

“Your…kid?”

Lex squawked at the sight of his bottle. “My son.”

“ _Tony_.” Sharma breathed.

“That would be the truth we’re keeping under wraps. Not for much longer, but long enough that the Board can’t use him against me.”

“Well then,” Tony could hear Truman’s frantic scrambling with paperwork, “we need to get this Hearing done as soon as possible!”

“Nope. We’re not worried about the hearing, Truman.”

“We’re not? What are we worried about?”

“You’re going to salt the earth,” Sharma declared.

“I am indeed. What I need from you is enough time to burn everything down.”

“Mr. Stark is taking out the Board of Stark Industries,” Pepper said, in case Tony’s dramatics weren’t clear. “He’s gathering information, and what he needs is enough time to stay out of any legal entanglements that might impede that process.”

There was a moment of silence, then the lawyers sprang into action. “Then we need to try and disqualify the SI counsel for conflict of interest.” Truman said.

“To do that we’ll need copies of paychecks with Tony’s signature.” Sharma pointed out.

“And any time they’ve done work that could be construed as personally for Tony and not strictly for the company,” Harper added.

“It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, kids,” Tony called over the line before they could start a plotting a months-long siege. “I just need to keep a judge from telling me I shouldn’t be in my own system.”

“And enough time to sort through whatever you find and get the blackmail into place, Tony,” Sharma added. “Blackmail is not as easy as I make it appear.”

“It’ll be sorting through who’s getting blackmailed after everyone else goes to jail.”

“You really think there’s enough criminal conduct that the Board won’t able to pay their way out of it?” Sharma asked.

“It won’t them versus an overworked prosecutor, kids. It’ll be them versus me.”

“You’re who I’d put my money on any time, Mr. Stark.” He could hear the smile in Pepper’s voice.

“Me and the house, Pep, we don’t like to lose.”

“Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“That’ll do it, Miss Potts.”

Tony closed the call and left them to their planning. For all Tony knew, they wouldn’t need to delay things at all because JARVIS had the necessary information but didn’t want to share it during Lex time. Or, he could have suspicions and his logic circuits would require another month of distrustful behavior before something became enough to be fact.

Either way, Jarvis swept into the kitchen and handed Lex a bottle and Tony a sandwich that smelled so tasty he didn’t object to all the vegetables. Jarvis couldn’t make up for Tony not eating yesterday before his firefight, but he could aid in recovery. With his son in one hand and sandwich in the other, Tony gave in to Jarvis’ prodding and ignored the stairs to instead go sit on the balcony, chasing Lex around with the new toys that had come out of hiding and feeling the sun on his face. Despite his inclination to do laundry, Tony teased Jarvis into staying with them. It was the sort of happy family morning that neither man had ever dreamed could happen to a Stark.

When Lex went down for his nap, Jarvis again directed Tony away from the stairs and put him to work on gathering up the bits of shattered piano and clearing out the wet bar. (Which required a sledgehammer and more clearing.) Rather than exploding toys all over the living room, Jarvis had decided the piano room was going to be a play area but first Tony needed to fix the hole in the ceiling. Tony knew he was being deliberately distracted from an existential spiral about his company, but it was nice to have JARVIS calling out instructions and Jarvis holding the ladder like physics would stop working and the triangle was going to collapse.

Jarvis had probably meant for the manual labor to get Tony out of his head, but instead it gave his brain the chance to compute something in the background, like surfing the internet when JARVIS when running calculations. He probably meant for Tony to actually fix the floor too, but about halfway through the ceiling, something clicked in Tony’s brain. He hopped down from the ladder, told Jarvis he’d be back in a minute, and to the man’s never-ending surprise went for Lex’ room with the same drive he used when inspiration struck in the lab.

Being Tony’s kid, Lex felt a ripple in the force and was rubbing fat fists against his eyes when Tony stepped in the room. “So,” Tony plucked him from the crib, “we need to talk about a few things, L. Because you’re going to hear a lot of shit for the rest of your life and I want you to have heard the truth from me first so you can ignore everything else. And I’ll warn you, the lies they’re going to shout at you to get your reaction for a picture, those are still going to hurt like a slipped soldering iron, but you can stop the wound pretty quick if you know the truth and can lord it over them. You don’t even tell them things half of the time, you just get this smirk like you know something they don’t, which you do. Gossip rags and real journalists hate that smirk. Though I’m not going to lie to you, there are far fewer real journalists than there are gossip rags, especially when it comes to us.”

Lex just watched him with those solemn eyes that somehow managed to take up a third of his face. Tony was pacing and ranting with his kid in his arms and Lex didn’t seem to give a shit, happy to just listen to his father’s voice talk about anything. Tony remembered that feeling. Howard didn’t like anyone in his lab – which Tony understood. He’d be paranoid too with the amount of foreign agents Howard had trying to talk or seduce their way into that room.

But Tony still snuck in there all the time, and he loved hiding under a table and listening to Howard talk to himself while he worked. It was one of the greatest wishes of Tony’s tiny heart to make something good enough that Howard knew he could trust him in his lab so Tony could sit there listening to Howard’s voice all the time and feel the comfort of his father’s ramble like he listened to the stereo now. He’d liked to be there because Howard talked to his projects like Tony suspected he talked to women he respected: still charming, still cajoling, but more affection than sex. Tony liked that tone in his father’s voice and hiding there meant he could pretend Howard was talking to him instead of explosive material.

“First off,” with that memory, Tony began where he hadn’t meant to, “Howard never hit me. I cannot tell you the number of girlfriends I’ve had who think Howard was beating me. He wasn’t. He wasn’t even a drunk. He used drinking as a stress reliever, so yeah, he drank pretty much every day, but he wasn’t a slurring, stumbling, drunk. You can’t engineer if your hands are shaking.

“Howard just, and I wish I didn’t have to tell you this one, but you need all the data so you can know where I’m coming from here kid, Howard didn’t like me. I’m not gonna lie, I spent a long time thinking it was because there was something wrong with me, because who doesn’t like their kid? But somewhere in there – and this was before Afghanistan, no matter what Pepper says – I figured out it wasn’t about me. Howard wanted an heir to the company, heirs are generally babies, and Howard didn’t think about all the stuff that comes along with having someone to pass your company on to. Snuggles are necessary, and time, and apparently old rock standards sung at half tempo. These are all the things that Howard wasn’t really up for.

“But here’s the trick that I’m pretty sure made everything worse: Howard knew he wasn’t up to them and didn’t like that someone else was. Everything would’ve been fine if Howard would’ve just abdicated all paternal responsibilities to Grandpa Jarvis and treated me like a tiny protege, but he didn’t. He got mad at Jarvis for being too paternal, and then he half-assed his own attempts at being a dad. You see where I’m going with this?”

Lex just blinked his exhausted eyes.

“Right. JARVIS, you’re recording this?”

“I assume that is hypothetical since I record everything, Sir.”

“Great. We’re going to have to show him this later when he’s got verbal recall because I don’t think I can have this conversation again.”

“I have sorted the footage into the Put It on The Fridge file.”

Tony snorted. “What else have you got there?”

“Footage of my other self at his original age, as well as his explanation for his regression.”

Tony froze. “Yeah. We’re going to end up with a lot of messed up things in there, aren’t we?”

“I imagine every family has them, Sir. You have simply chosen to keep a visual record.”

“That’s a thing I do, kid, visual record. I used to be more of a forgive and forget kind of a guy, but back at MIT, Uncle Rhodey – you haven’t met him yet, but you will just as soon as I figure  _that_  out – one time he took pictures of my ex-girlfriend making out with someone. We broke up, and when she came back a month later and I was all ready to forgive her, Rhodey pulled out the pictures. It was pretty damn effective.

“Back on target. I wanted to get this out there because I realized that even when we take down the Board, it’s not going to be done. For the rest of our lives we’re going to have to keep an eye on whoever we put on the Board and sweep it out occasionally because people are the worst, even if you put them on the Board thinking they’re the best. And we’re going to have the military hounding us, and people asking about Iron Man, and I was thinking I could just fix this and it would be better for you.

“But it’s not going to be. It’s never going to be. My new lawyer, today he called me an alcoholic and a whore, and you’re probably going to hear shit like that about me before your tiny brain is ready to deal with it. Not that any kid is ready to hear about the parents’ sex life, but still.”

Tony’s kid was built solid, but he still cradled Lex tight to his chest, trying to wrap the baby up in his arms where the world couldn’t touch him. “That’s kind of where we’re going with this. I can read all the books in the world on the subject of parenting – and I could probably teach a class on the conflicting theories at this point – but I don’t have a lot of practical experience, and I  _need_ practical experience. Dad would buy new tech and I used to take it apart and put it back together again to figure out how it worked. Though as a kid, my putting back together skills weren’t the best. The trouble here is, I can’t really take apart our relationship and put it back together again. First, because you don’t really have any communication skills yet to tell me if it’s working right, and second, because I’m terrified that I’ll break something irreparable, and it’s not like I can go out and get a new you and try again.

“That means we’re stuck with experiments. I want a happy, healthy, fully-functioning kid that I like and who likes me without it turning into one of those ‘you have to be their parent, not their friend’ things that even I’ve heard about. But all my experience is theoretical. JARVIS has been compiling episodes from a bunch of different TV shows that have what other people call good examples of healthy parental relationships, but that’s not really the same thing. You get me?

“So, we’re going to have to scientific method the shit out this relationship, L, you and me. And we’re going to have failed experimental pathways, and I’ll be pissed, and you’ll be pissed, but no matter what, I’ll love you, and I’ll never stop the experiment because I always want you to know that I love you. And I’m sorry that you keep having to age up to deal with me, but I’m going to get better at this, I promise. What I’m trying to say here is that I love you.”

Tony gave a little bounce, the heat of Lex against his chest soothing the ache there and K’s fat fist grabbing the collar of Tony’s shirt and dragging it down. “Though I’ve tried before to tell you,” Tony tried to speak on tune instead of sing.

“Da.” Lex was obviously unimpressed.

Tony leaned in close. “I have a secret to tell you. A real secret. One that would straight up ruin my reputation if it ever got out. So, no telling anybody, okay? Pinkie swear?” Tony wiggled his pinkie through Lex’s fist and around his smallest finger. He gave a dramatic shake to seal the bargain and Lex giggled.

“Oh, you’re going to be laughing more.” Tony pressed his lips to Lex’s ear. “I like Sting.”

“Da!” Lex pushed his face back, more about the tickling breath on his earlobe, but Tony laughed anyway.

“I know, I know! It’s embarrassing but I can’t teach you not to give a shit about what other people think if I’m doing the same. And really, his songs lend themselves much better to lullabies than AC/DC.”

Lex yanked Tony’s shirt again, like, if you’re going to do it, do it.

Tony rolled his eyes. “All right already. Though I’ve tried before to tell you of the feeling in my heart, every time that I come near you, I lose my nerve like from the start.” Tony’s voice was hoarse as he tried to sing without singing, but with every line Lex’s smile grew and the inhibition slipped away.

“Every little thing he does is magic. Everything he does just turns me on.” Tony stopped singing to clarify. “Not in a creepy way. We’ll work on that.” He went back to singing, this time with no care but for his son’s smile. “Every little thing he does is magic, everything he does just turns me on. Even though my life before was tragic, now I know my love for him goes on.”

Tony didn’t know it, but JARVIS recorded it all and put it On the Fridge. And if the AI routed it to Jarvis in the kitchen so he could watch Tony dance around the nursery and listen to Lex laugh at the first time he’d ever heard his father sing, that was no one’s business but the Jarvises.


	11. Chapter 11

“Sir. Sir please, I need you to wake.”

Tony startled half out of bed. “I wasn’t having a panic attack.”

“No, Sir. You were sleeping. However, I need you to regain consciousness.”

“Didn’t we just get a lecture from my therapist about how I’m supposed to be sleeping at night?”

“Sir, APOLLO has news.”

That woke Tony up faster than a cold shower after a bender. “Tell me.”

“Your lab please, Sir.”

Somehow that was worse than JARVIS not playing along with the midnight teasing. The entire house was more private than most military facilities, so if JARVIS wanted the security of the lab protocols then this was going to be terrible. Tony didn’t waste time getting dressed or grabbing coffee, he just stroked a hand through his son’s hair where he was sprawled out in his crib and went downstairs.

“Hit me, J.”

“I have found the Mark I, Sir.” Tony startled when an entirely new voice came out of nowhere, but people didn’t call him a genius for nothing.

“Nice to hear you, APOLLO, though I wish it was under better circumstances.”

“I have completed a significant component of the task assigned to me, Sir. It is my understanding that that is a pertinent barometer in determining the quality of any given set of circumstances.”

“Way to look at the positive, Paulie.”

“Paulie, Sir?” There was a moment where JARVIS updated his counterpart in a string of zeros and ones about this quirk of their mutual creator. “Ah, yes, Paulie.”

“Don’t worry about. What do you mean you found the Mark I? It’s buried in a desert.”

“No, Sir. The Mark I is located in the basement of Sector 16 of the original Stark Industries, California engineering campus. Specifically, underneath the arc reactor building.”

“Proof?” Tony croaked.

One of the screens over Tony’s desk popped open and sped through security footage of crates arriving at the building’s delivery door and getting hauled inside by men in black military uniforms who absolutely didn’t work for Stark Industries. One of the scientists – no doubt the lead engineer based upon enough leeway to be that stupid – popped open the crate right there in clear sight of the loading bay camera and plucked out a piece of metal that Tony recognized as belonging to the shattered chest plate. A soldier smacked him with his non-shooting hand and shoved the guy back inside.

“Were they even trying to hide this?”

“The delivery occurred in the middle of the night and the security footage was later deleted. I apologize for the time it took me to recover it, Sir. I had to assemble this from fragmented pieces on the mainframe.”

“You’ve done good, APOLLO. I don’t suppose you have any footage of a member of the Ten Rings dropping off the Mark I?”

The question was glib, but APOLLO didn’t know that yet. “No, Sir. I do, however, have footage of Mr. Stane boarding a flight from LAX to Washington DC where records indicate that he spent the next two days in closed door meetings with various government officials.”

“And where do  _your_ records indicate he was?” Tony’s voice caught at the question.

APOLLO pulled up a grainy still from security cameras coded to Bagram AFB in Afghanistan. “There are no records of Mr. Stane’s arrival or departure, though what images I could recover indicate that he left within four hours of his arrival.”

“And he departed with the crates.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Well… fuck.” Tony dropped to his chair like his strings had been cut. “Obi?”

“JARVIS and myself have also located a back door into Mr. Stane’s private email server. We discovered video of a ransom demand from when you were in being held hostage.”

“Visualization of that is unnecessary, APOLLO” JARVIS interrupted. “I can testify to its veracity, Sir. You do not need to see it.”

“Show it to me, J.”

“No, Sir.”

“J—”

“If you insist on doing so, Sir, I first must insist that you speak to Dr. Keyworth about the benefit of such an idea.”

“Stanley isn’t my keeper and you don’t take your orders from him.”

“In this matter you provided me with instructions to rely on his expertise regarding your mental well-being instead of your decisions. I will provide you a list of the material APOLLO has collected if you require it. In summary, according to my understanding and analysis, there is sufficient material to convict both Stane and three fourths of the Stark Industries Board of Directors of treason and related activities. Of those few without sufficient evidence for a conviction, only two have not engaged in activities that fall below the ethics standard in their contracts, and all are below your personal ethics requirements. I will make these materials available for Miss Potts if you would like a human’s perspective on the information, but I cannot in good conscience allow you to analyze it without psychiatric supervision.”

Tony’s pride wanted to object, but the memory of Lex’s newfound voice was enough to keep it in check. “Well look at you, J. I’ll take the list.” Stanley probably wouldn’t have agreed that staying up all night to analyze data on his corrupt company was the best way to impose order on the chaos that was Tony’s day to day life, but not mainlining coffee would have to be good enough.

Tony determinedly didn’t think about climbing in the armor to rip apart the whole damn building and get back the corpse of his first suit. He didn’t think about the crush of the caves around him, or screaming as the last guns he would ever build ripped through flesh and made grotesque paintings that in 10,000 years other humans would think primitive man meant as rain. He didn’t think about how these idiot engineers, Tony’s own people, were trying to reconstruct the armor like Frankenstein’s monster, and not a single damn one of them thought about telling Tony what they had locked in the basement. He didn’t think about Yinsen’s blood streaked across the Mark I’s palms, and he didn’t think about the three soldiers who’d been smiling thirty seconds before a bomb bearing Tony’s name had killed them.

Stanley had told Tony to play the long game, to play with his head and not his heart, and he could do that.

As satisfying as it would be to put the Mark I back in the desert sand alongside whatever abomination Tony’s own scientists were trying to create, that would mean burying proof of Stane’s compliance. The kids had done some damn fine work sneaking through the servers and gathering evidence, but right now Stane could still lie and say he had shuffled money from one of his secret accounts to try and get Tony back and hadn’t told the FBI because he had a duty to Tony and the company to keep things going. He could claim that he put his people on it, but no one could free Tony like Tony. Or he could say he didn’t trust the government to get the job done since they were the ones who lost Tony in the first place.

It would all be a crock of shit, but considering Stane had picked up the Mark I surrounded by military personnel and put it on a US Air Force cargo plane, Stane must have had some government backers. The slightest justifiable excuse would be enough to keep Stane from jail time. Worse, it would give the Board and their fellow cockroaches space to skitter back into hiding. Instead, Tony bit his tongue and held his breath, bringing order to the chaos rather than letting it sweep him where it would.

As much as Tony would have liked to go through every piece of data himself with a fine-tooth comb so he could find those human quirks JARVIS could still miss, JARVIS behaved more like his namesake’s wife and policed hard what he let Tony see. The Ten Ring’s demand that Obi up the price for killing Tony was the worst of it. Tony couldn’t imagine how terrible it would’ve been if JARVIS had given him more than a single line summary of the contents. Even that was enough that Tony backed himself into the ‘bots’ corner and hid behind their giant recharging frames. It wasn’t like Lex could walk downstairs and see him trying not to freak out, but accidentally aging his kid only needed to happen once in a day. There were other emails where JARVIS felt the need to offer up summaries instead of the actual text, and Tony didn’t complain about a single one of them, no matter how many shitty things he’d heard the Board say about him before.

(And if JARVIS had to keep flashing math problems on Tony’s tablet to lure his brain back from starting to panic, that was between them. At least, until JARVIS no doubt passed a spreadsheet on Tony’s blood pressure on to Stanley, but these were extenuating circumstances.)

As it was, JARVIS refused to let Tony binge on the material. Any time Tony started breathing too fast or Lex twitched, JARVIS locked down the information and sent Tony out of the workshop and up into the sunshine. Tony let the AI mother hen. By the first time JARVIS shut him out for spiraling, Tony had already verified that Stane hadn’t shared news of his contact with the Ten Rings, even to his own secret contacts in the military that might have been able to do something with it. That was all the information Tony needed to place the only call he really needed to make. Going through every other bit of information was just to satisfy his curiosity, and so Tony pretend later that he was the hacker who’d found all this shit. (He didn’t think the government would permit an AI designed to hunt and destroy to testify as a whistle blower.)

Tony went about his morning the same as he would have if he hadn’t just discovered his godfather had tried to have him murdered by terrorists – minus, you know, several pauses throughout the day for math problems and the spontaneous snuggling of Lex. Tony fed Lex, then moved himself from sitting on the floor at one end of the couch to the other as Lex kept pulling himself upright and sidestepping along the sofa to chase his dad. Tony took the kid downstairs for some engineering, then told Jarvis it would probably be easier to just build a robot to fold those clothes than to do it himself and got a lecture on value of housework.

While Lex napped, Tony played with APOLLO as a reward to the AI for all its diligent work. They did some blackmail research on all those Board members that JARVIS was sweet enough to think wouldn’t be able to buy their way out of prison time. (Frankly, Tony thought bankrupting them and using all their funds to rebuild the countries they had helped bomb out for their own profit would be a better thing than prison, but that might require some doing. Yay, civil lawsuits.)  Tony fed his kid again, helped Jarvis clean up, then tucked away all signs of Lex’s life into parts of the house no one would go and sent both Lex and Jarvis upstairs just in time for Happy to arrive with the personification of Tony’s vengeance.

Supervisory Special Agent Peter Burke was average in every way except for his brain. Even that was special more due to Peter’s thirst to problem solve than any regular sort of brilliance. The man was relentless, and that drive made an average-looking, average-built, average accountant of a man into one of the best agents at the FBI.

The first time they’d met, the FBI was using Tony as a witness to some other company’s fraud. Tony had refused to work with the accused because he couldn’t figure out how their products could be turning the profit they were claiming. (The FBI had accused Tony of back door dealing. Tony had laughed and showed them the math.) Over the course of the case, Burke had impressed Tony enough that he’d offered him a job at SI, which Burke had counter-offered with a junior agent position in White Collar since Tony had better instincts than anyone in the office but him. Tony had laughed and then slept with the man – and again any time Tony was in New York. When Burke got married, Tony sent the man and his pretty wife the world’s best present, and she’d counter-offered with an invitation to dinner to hear about all her husband’s sexploits with the great Tony Stark. (Apparently, she hadn’t really believed Peter when he claimed Tony Stark on his list of past lovers. That dinner had been  _amazing_. Tony did know Peter could blush.)

More important than Peter’s tongue or how that relentlessness could be otherwise applied, Tony trusted Peter’s integrity. He also could respect a man who knew when he was out of his depth. Peter had called Tony a few times over the years to see if confiscated computers could be cracked open without destroying the pertinent information. (Which meant, yes, Tony Stark was on the books as an FBI Consultant. If you thought he hadn’t made them give him a badge to show off, you were an idiot.)

Tony met Peter with open arms at the front door of his mansion, laughing when Peter’s hello was, “You know, I had to fake a sick day for you, Stark. And my team isn’t stupid, so they all know I’m not sick and think that El and I are just having a sex day, but she’s working. They’re going to figure out I’m up to something.”

“If you trust them, they can figure out whatever in the hell you want. It’s your bosses and anyone you don’t think can keep their mouth shut who can believe you spent the day masturbating while your wife was at work.”

Peter pulled out of the hug at Tony’s tone. “Tony?”

“Come with me. I’ve got files for you to look at before we talk.”

Of course, Tony Stark didn’t have actual hard copy files for Peter to flip through, he had a tablet. Tony didn’t waste time leading Peter down the garden path or letting him make decisions for himself about what the information was telling him. Instead, he went straight for the throat with the email from Obadiah Stane’s computer. Peter was a professional, so despite how much he wanted to vomit, he clicked play and watched Tony be tortured while Tony obeyed JARVIS’ silent directive and stayed on the opposite side of the room.

“What—” Peter’s voice cracked. “What are they saying?”

“According to my AI, they’re telling him they want more money than the $500,000 he already paid them to kill me. I’d have given you subtitles, but I know you guys are fussy about getting your own translations.”

“We never got this, Tony. The government, I mean. No one got this video. Even if by some miracle they were able to keep it away from reporters, everyone in the government would’ve known about it. Stane never passed this on.”

“I know.”

“I mean, holy fuck Tony, we could’ve tracked the IP it was sent from, we could’ve figured out something about the dialect and accent, we could’ve put it in front of  _geologists_  to try and figure out the mountain range!” Peter gestured sharply with the tablet, but his white knuckles meant it wasn’t going to accidentally get flung anywhere.

“I think we can safely say that Stane’s primary concern wasn’t getting me safely home.”

“How in the hell did you get this?”

“The bastard sent it from the SI servers.”

“But don’t you have security?”

“Security that I designed. I left myself back doors and it’s my fucking company. You don’t have to worry about a judge throwing it out any more than other shit turned over by a whistle blower.”

“Tony, as overwhelmed as I am that you trusted me with this, this is funding terrorism and I’m white collar crime.”

“Oh, you’ll get there.”

“What?”

“Keep going through the other documents, Petey-pie.” Tony gestured Peter’s attention back to the screen. Tony didn’t think he could look the man in the eye while he said what he had to say. He turned to face the windows and watched the waves crashing out at sea and wasted some time trying to match his breathing to their unpredictable rhythm. “It’s worse than just me. Stane has been selling my bombs to terrorists and half my fucking Board knew about it and just pocketed the money. The other half should’ve known and decided not to ask any questions.”

“Holy shit.”

“Pretty much. You’re going to go through all the information I’ve got there for you, and when you get back to the office it’ll be partitioned off on your computer. You’re going to put together your case against all of them and you’re going to give me a heads up when you’re dragging them into prison cells so that the moment you all turn up at my office I can lock everything down, including all their accounts tied to SI. And when they claim that it’s white collar crime and they deserve to be out on bail, the prosecutor is going to stand up in front of a judge and tell the whole damn world that they’re in on conspiracy to commit murder and international terrorism. If you need to hand that part of the case off to someone else, make damn sure that it’s someone you trust as much as I trust you. If this breaks open before you’ve got them all in custody, we’re never getting them back and I get to spend the rest of my life waiting to be murdered. I really don’t want that.”

Peter didn’t force Tony around to look at him, but he did put a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “I’ll take this back to my house and have the best of my team meet me there tonight. We’ll go over all of it and with a little bit of luck we should have charges filed the day after tomorrow. Either way, I’ll move as fast as possible because the longer this is out there, the more likely it is we’ll have a leak.”

“Is your house secure enough?”

“I’ve got a CI whose middle name is paranoid and thinks El is too good for me. I can’t keep you out but I know that my place is secure as they can make it. He stops by once a week to have brunch with El and brings his scanners to check for bugs.”

“Good. Though when you make it to the end of that paperwork on the flight, you might decide you want to keep it from tainting your house.”

Peter finally tugged him around. “Tony, are you talking to somebody? Because this makes me want to stop by the office shrink and it didn’t even happen to me.”

“I am, and I’ll probably hear from him again about ten minutes after this information goes live.”

“Will that be soon enough?”

“Eh, there’s a decent chance that my butler already has a home visit scheduled for the moment you leave and just hasn’t told me about yet to keep me from running away before he gets here.”


	12. Chapter 12

It seemed that APOLLO, with JARVIS’ help, was damn good at his job. Despite Peter’s warning, it didn’t take two days and luck, it took a flight home and enough time for Peter to get a judge out of bed, review the evidence, and sign some arrest warrants. Tony got his call at 2:00 AM, thankfully on a regular phone instead of video chat since there was no hiding the arc reactor in his chest or the baby pressed against him and gnawing on the bottle like it was a binkie. (13 different shapes and brands of binkies and all his kid wanted was the bottle nipple. And not just the nipple popped off, or even the lid unscrewed, he wanted the whole empty bottle as a pacifier.)

“I’m sorry for waking you, Mr. Stark.” Peter greeted and Tony accepted the warning inherent in Peter’s formality.

“I was up, Agent Burke. What do you need?”

“I’m with The Honorable Judge Calhoun, a Federal Court Judge here in Manhattan who’ll probably end up being assigned the case on a permanent basis. He’s agreed to sign the arrest and search warrants.” JARVIS brought up a picture of an elderly white man with a head of thick silver hair with a mustache that made him look like he should be in an old Western, counseling heroes on the path of righteousness.

“And His Honor wants me to confirm that you’re not just blowing smoke; I’ll actually open up the SI mainframe?”

“Judge Calhoun here, Mr. Stark. Frankly, I’m more concerned with you preserving any evidence or assets before the accused fly the coop. The FBI can’t search for what’s been deleted.”

“That’s actually a misconception, Your Honor, but I can keep everything just as it was before the warrants dropped. I could do it right now, but I think the safest way to avoid accidentally triggering any protocols that might warn the accused would be for me to shut down the system the same moment the FBI starts conducting their raids.”

“That sounds good to me. What about you, Agent Burke?”

“It’s practical. And Your Honor, if you wouldn’t mind ignoring us all for a moment while we go off the record?” The man snorted and Tony bet the Judge hadn’t even leaned away from the phone. If he was trustworthy enough to be the one Peter dragged out of bed, Tony wasn’t worried. “Mr. Stark, if you wanted to use your not inconsiderable talents to keep things in order, we’d appreciate that.”

“What does that even mean, Burke?” Judge Calhoun asked.

“Don’t worry about it, Your Honor, I got it.” Tony might have understood a little less if he and Peter hadn’t discussed how Tony could shut down all the Board’s known and unknown bank accounts, stop their families and their mistresses from leaving the country, and all sorts of other safety latches that people were so fond of using to escape the full reach of justice.

“I believe you, Mr. Stark. But let’s not poison the tree and ruin evidence, shall we?”

“Believe me, Your Honor, there’s no one in the world that wants these people to face justice more than I do.”

Lex chose that moment to spit out the end of the bottle and grumble that Tony was interrupting his snooze. Tony froze, which only made Lex grumble louder, and Tony’s lungs seized at being so stupid as to give away his kid, but JARVIS flashed his screen before Tony could drop into a panic. Ten seconds later and Tony wouldn’t have noticed, but JARVIS caught him with just enough brain in control that Tony could process the words on the screen.

“I filtered out the noise, Sir.”

Tony forced himself to keep to a slow, steady breath through his nose instead of the sigh he wanted to heave. He checked back in to hear the judge giving final instructions about the limits of their warrants, despite how the behavior of the accused offended all their sensibilities.

“Thanks for your effort Agents, Your Honor. Peter, just give me the high sign when it’s time. I’ll have everything ready to go on your signal.” Tony had JARVIS cut the call, assuming that Peter’s original timeline of a few hours to get his fellow agents from on standby to arrests still applied. If not, Peter could call him back because Tony needed a moment.

“Fuck, that was close.”

“Language.”

“Justified.”

“There is a several microsecond delay between your vocalizations and my transmission of said vocalizations, Sir. That is enough time to block any sounds Young Sir might make.”

“And if he starts talking over me?”

“It is my understanding that ‘dropped calls’ are a universal experience.”

“Not in Tony Stark’s house.”

“The main reasons for your concealment of Young Sir are about to be arrested, Sir.”

“So dropped calls are the least of my worries?”

“Or a soon to be unnecessary problem.”

Tony may or may not have sat in the workshop with his son in his arms waiting for the moment when that problem really did become unnecessary. JARVIS had everything queued while their little family of boys and ‘bots waited for the phone call. When it came, JARVIS paused just long enough for Tony to nod before the AI burned through the system and locked out everyone who wasn’t Tony Stark. Peter didn’t ask any questions about the speed of Tony’s confirmation that they were good to proceed, just clicked off the line with a promise that the infrared said Stane was the only person in his house and according to the house plans, was asleep in his bed.

“In five minutes, we’re going to have him custody. He’ll be in a squad car on his way to FBI headquarters for questioning. In ten minutes, you can sleep until CNN drags you out for a comment.”

Like an idiot, Tony believed him.

JARVIS managed to urge Tony upstairs and as far as the living room sofa before Peter called back. “He’s locked himself in the panic room off the bedroom. We tripped a secondary alarm on entrance to the house and he took cover.”

“Are you sure?”

“His sheets are still warm. There’s no place else he could be. I’ve got one of my agents on the line to the security company and they’re remotely unlocking it. This will put us off by a few minutes since we didn’t want to move on the other Board members until we had Stane in hand.”

“Give me a second.” Tony jumped up from his couch. Like a champ, Lex didn’t shout at the motion.

“Tony, no! This is just an update for your safety, not a request. You hacking into a room Stane can’t get out of would cross the line.”

A shout of “Burke!” came from the background.

“It’s open, Tony. I’ll call you when he’s in custody.”

JARVIS held the line open. There was crashing and shouting on the other end, broken only by Peter’s cursing. Tony didn’t need to make Peter pick up again when he could figure out for himself that Stane was gone. Odds were that Stane had gotten himself an unregistered exit to the safe room that wasn’t on the plans.

“J, get me every home security camera from the houses around him so we can figure out what in the hell is going on!” Tony shouted as he ran back to his workshop. Lex held on for the ride.

Burke got back on the line. Like the gentleman he was, he ignored that he didn’t have to dial. “Tony, he’s gone.”

“I know, I’m looking. They don’t have CCTV in this neighborhood but I’ve tapped into the neighborhood security cameras.”

“Do you have a visual?”

“Not yet. Do your chasing thing. I’ll let you know when I have a direction to point you.”

“We’re already on the way down the secret stairs. I’m hanging up on your now so I can tell the other teams to move on the rest of our targets. We can’t wait to capture Stane. Stay in your house and stay safe.”

They hung up on one another.

“APOLLO, what do you have for me?” Tony asked as he set Lex down in his crib.

“Nothing yet, Sir. I have prioritized all Stark Industries properties and accounts already flagged as part of Stane’s network.”

“Has he gone after any of them?”

“Not yet, Sir. I have expanded my search.”

“Don’t leave those things unwatched. And keep an eye on my shit since Stane is apparently the kind of guy to come up behind you and stab you in the back. What do you have for me, J?”

“I am monitoring CCTV footage on every possible departure point from Stane’s neighborhood and all cameras from the local residences. He has yet to visibly pass by any of them. The FBI Agents have, however, and based off their hurry they have yet to locate Stane.”

“Keep looking.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Tony didn’t know if JARVIS had diverted some of his precious processing power to waking up Jarvis or if he could just feel the stress in the air. “Anthony?”

“Don’t worry about it, J.”

“It’s three thirty in the morning, Anthony. What’s happening?”

Tony glanced up and paused. “Are you wearing sweats as pajamas, J?”

“Anthony.”

“I didn’t know you even knew those things existed. Are you going to break out into hives at their touch on your skin?”

“Anthony, please.”

And Tony never could refuse that tone, no matter how much it would’ve been better for all of them in the long run. “The FBI moved on Stane this morning.”

“When?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“Already? And what has gone wrong if you’re frantically typing rather than victory engineering?”

“J and Paulie really know what they’re doing when it comes to gathering incriminating evidence. But Stane had a secret exit to his panic room and the FBI lost him in the neighborhood.”

“How?”

“Because Obadiah Stane is a sneaky bastard.”

“Have the boys found him yet?”

“Nope.”

“Are you contributing something to their search or are you simply panicking and getting in their electronic way?”

“Sir is the creator, Mr. Jarvis.” APOLLO objected.

“Sir is never in the way.” JARVIS added.

“I’m going over their searches because there’s a human element that the boys still can’t really factor for. Humans are illogical and unpredictable, Stane apparently more than most.”

“Shouldn’t the FBI be the ones trying to predict him?”

“They’ve got a coordinated hit against everyone that was in on it with Stane so they’re spread a little thin. They weren’t expecting the 60-year-old executive to make a run for it.”

“I thought you turned over the information just yesterday afternoon?”

“I told you the boys are good. Peter got the warrants just over an ago. He called me from the Judge’s house and asked me to lock down SI when they got started.”

“And now?”

“Now we’re hunting the bad guy.”

“And how is that going?”

“We haven’t found him yet.”

Jarvis wanted to ask a hundred questions about where Stane might be, or how in the world Tony would be able to guess when he hadn’t known for all those years that Stane was double dealing. Tony probably had the same blind spots as his mechanical children, but pointing that out wouldn’t be helpful. As much as Edwin wanted Anthony to turn it over to the FBI and let them handle matters, apparently there were things that only Anthony Stark could do. Edwin hadn’t liked it when Anthony was a boy carrying the weight of the world, but at least this time his shoulders were broader and stronger to handle the increased load.

JARVIS interrupted Edwin’s mulling on the unfairness of life. “Sir, I have found Stane in one of his neighbor’s vehicles on a traffic camera.”

“Map.” JARVIS brought up the city streets with a highlight of Stane’s residence and a blinking dot of where Stane had been sighted, along with stills from the camera that he’d passed by. Though Edwin had not known it before, JARVIS indicated that Stane lived in the hills near Los Angeles rather than the slick, impersonal apartment he would have assumed. As such, there had been no camera activity until Stane reached the city, and even then, it was on what might be considered the edge of town, nowhere near Stark Industries’ headquarters or even their main campus for work.

“APOLLO, where’s he going?”

“Sir… I do not…”

“Best guess, Paul.”

If the AI had a throat to clear, Edwin imagined he would’ve. As it was, the AI chose to highlight a point on JARVIS’ maps not terribly far from the edge of town. “The old SI campus? You think he’s going for the arc reactor?”

“Given my limited understanding of Obadiah Stane I believe he would—”

“The abomination he’s making from the corpse of the Mark I.” Tony’s brain leapt ahead.

“I concur with APOLLO’s assessment, Sir.”

“I can extrapolate other locations that might possess some value to him, Sir.”

“No, you’re right.”

Edwin had a moment to be astonished at the depth of life Tony was able to coax from his creations, but then Tony stepped atop one of his platforms and the armor began assembling around him. Under other circumstances it would be poetry in motion, but in these, Edwin could only ask why.

“Stane has got to know he’s been stung by the FBI, which means he’d got to guess that the airports and SI are closed to him. If he wants out, he’s going to need something else that flies, and that’ll be his abomination.”

“Will he be able to run off to the Middle East like you did?”

“I doubt it. They’ve got to be tying their suit into the large arc reactor to try and fuel this. That’s why they’re there. The only other arc reactors in the world are the one in my chest and the one in my suit.”

“So how far will the large arc reactor be able to get him?”

“It’ll all depend on what kind of battery pack they’ve got lashed to it and what they outfitted their suit with.”

“Will they be practical about that?”

“No, Stane wants a super suit for the military.”

“So, large and heavy, and outfitted with Stark weapons.”

“Yup.” Tony gave a few flicks of his wrist, checking the mechanical reactions of his suit rather than looking Edwin in the eye.

“Can they manage a good enough battery to actually get him very far?”

“No.”

“Then where is he going?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then why would he want to get to the other suit?”

“…I don’t know.”

“But Anthony—”

Tony twisted to face him. “I don’t know, J! The suit won’t be able to get very far, so I don’t know if he’s planning to get himself surrounded by FBI agents and then hop over their heads, or if he’s planning to use the suit as a bargaining chip, or if he’s planning suicide by cop. I don’t know!”

“Anthony!” Edwin breathed. “I apologize. You do not need to know everything. But neither do you need to  _do_  everything. Tell Agent Burke that you spotted Stane and let the people who get paid for this sort of thing handle him.”

“And if Stane is trying to take out as many agents as he can with my weapons so he can run away?”

Jarvis didn’t have an answer that Tony would like. He wanted the professionals with body armor to handle Stane, but Jarvis had seen the images of what havoc the Iron Man armor could wreak and it was designed for peace. A suit outfitted by Obadiah Stane would be meant for blood and terror, and Anthony was the only one who could stop him. “And what happens if Stane is going there to lure you in so he can take one of your arc reactors?”

“J…”

“They are, as you said, the only ones in the world that could power that suit enough to get away.”

“I don’t think Stane is thinking that long term. And his abomination won’t be able to make it all the way down to Malibu or the mansion.”

“I still think you should let Stane make his move first. Don’t go charging in to stop him when you don’t know his plans. Let him break through the building’s roof, or call his government friends and try to bargain, or let him pretend he didn’t realize it was the FBI and he thought he was running from terrorists of his own. Let Stane show his hand instead of you compromising yours.”

“And if his hand is killing people? If he knows he’s caught and the only thing to do is end as many other people as he can?”

“I don’t want one of those people to be you.”

“And if he comes for me to get my arc reactor and manages to make it here on whatever charge he’s got? Would it be better to battle it out with him over the old industrial park of Stark Industries, or over my house?”

There was nothing to say to that. Anthony snapped his mask down. “Keep the lights on J, I’ll be back soon.”

Anthony was off like a shooting star in reverse. Edwin closed his eyes and wondered if wishing upon this shooting star that it might be safe would only jinx matters and bring Anthony crashing to earth. Lex smacked his plump palm against the plexiglass of his crib and squawked out a demand that Edwin come pick him up. There was one Stark boy he could protect from the world, so Edwin did. Though based on the pats the boy gave his face, Edwin was quite sure that Alexander was rather more concerned with soothing Edwin’s worry than being soothed himself.

@@@@@

“Someone want to tell me what the fuck is going on in California?” Fury swept past the agents who were scrambling to do just that.

“I would that I could, Director.”

“You were supposed to be tracking this flying metal guy, Coulson.”

Phil hadn’t been intimidated by Fury for over a decade, and he wasn’t going to start now. While normally he wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at the man in front of junior agents, it was 3:30 in the morning and everyone was doing their best to piece together information. Shouting wasn’t going to help. “I have been. That’s why we knew thirty seconds after they started that the FBI was conducting raids on members of Stark Industries’ Board of Directors.”

“Why didn’t we know before?”

“There was no lag time, Director.” One of the agents called out.

Fury turned on the kid in a dramatic whirl of black leather. “Explain.”

“Uh.” The kid looked at Coulson, cleared his throat, and carried on. “The FBI got the information for their warrants after closing time today and reviewed the information not at any FBI office we have surveillance on. The time between getting the information and conducting the raids was less than 12 hours. Sir.”

“What in the hell does this have to do with the iron suit?”

“We don’t know specifics at this time.”

“Make a guess, Coulson!”

Phil wanted to snap that Fury hated it when people guessed without facts, but the room was filled with the sound of tapped FBI phone calls scrambling to arrest some of the most influential people in the country and the hunt for Obadiah Stane, who apparently had managed to evade the squad sent after him. “I can’t make a guess. The suit of armor hasn’t cropped up in any of their conversations, but Obadiah Stane making a runner has.”

“What kind of idiot lets an executive outrun them?”

Whatever answer Coulson might have had was cut out by Tony Stark’s voice coming through the phone line.

@@@@@

Tony’s flight to the old campus wasn’t fast enough. Two minutes out from the building, APOLLO informed Tony that he’d caught Stane’s stolen car on the loading bay cameras. “Whatever technology is inside the lab remains unattached to any network that I am able to access, Sir, so I cannot offer you more information than that. However, the arc reactor still appears to be stable.”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupted, “Agent Burke is on the line. I will cut out the sounds of the suit and replace them with the ambient sounds of the lab.” Tony agreed with JARVIS’ not so subtle opinion that Tony should keep his presence in the suit to himself.

“Pete, Stane is at the old SI campus.” Peter cursed and shouted to whoever was driving to redirect. Tony figured that pure adrenaline was the only reason the sirens in the background weren’t setting him off. “How in the hell did he get there so fast?”

“He’s stole a damn good car and he took the back roads down from the hills. I just caught him on camera entering the campus.”

“Are you going to clear us to enter?”

“No.”

“No? Stark are you kidding me?”

“We contract for the military. We’ve got tech in there that could kill every agent you bring in, Burke. I don’t know why he’s gone to the campus but I know he could do a hell of a lot of damage.”

“We’re trained for that kind of thing, Tony.”

“Not for the black ops shit Stane has been working on behind my back, Peter. But I’ve got people who  _are_ trained to stop it.”

“Tony—”

Tony cut the call. “JARVIS give him the busy tone when he calls back.”

“Agent Burke is cursing at you, Sir.” JARVIS’ tone said he wouldn’t have minded doing the same.

“They’re coming to the SI campus anyway?”

“Indeed, Sir. I assume I am to let the FBI enter the campus and direct them to your location after you have disarmed Stane?”

“Got it in one, J.”

“Sir,” APOLLO interrupted. “There has been a fluctuation in the arc reactor. A sudden drop in energy, followed by spikes as the machine attempts to compensate.”

“Meaning Stane has turned his abomination on.”

Tony came in hot, zeroing in on the building’s glass ceiling and ready to crash straight through and go in guns blazing. JARVIS chose that moment to showcase the height of his programming and say, “Mr. Jarvis has asked me to inform you that he has provided Young Sir with a midnight snack. He has voiced no displeasure at your continued absence and to my other self’s amusement, Young Sir seems concerned with forcing him to share in his pureed fruit as some form of consolation for his worry.”

Edwin Jarvis, master of the quiet guilt. “Right, tell him I got it, J.” Instead of crashing down with all his well-deserved, righteous fury, Tony landed on the roof and stared through the glass at the massive abomination beneath him. Whereas Tony’s suit was sleek and radiated personality, Stane looked like he was trying to be a metal version of the Hulk, only in that industrial matte silver favored by government contractors the world over. Stane’s suit was precisely what it was meant to look like: a weapon. A weapon currently occupied by a man who had spent several decades playing Tony, no matter how much he might like to pretend otherwise. Which meant Stane had probably been standing there in that suit for who knew how long just so he could look up at Tony, head and neck exposed in what Tony considered a design flaw and Stane’s scientists probably hadn’t even noticed. He looked Tony in the eye and then closed the lid around his face without any of the speed or the zippy snap there should’ve been when you were going into a fight.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this, Tony.”

The mechanical voice echoed up through the glass, but Tony didn’t answer. He did tell APOLLO to go plague on all the computers he could see down there, though. The poor program probably panicked about how it was supposed to get into the system, but eventually all Tony’s sons learned that sometimes you had to run before you could walk.

“What, are you not talking to me now, Tony? I though you grew out of that stage when you were fifteen! You got a hell of a lot less petulant after Howard died. And I’ll admit, for a while there you were a dream to work with. All you did was invent and drink, too busy fucking your way around Southern California to even realize what I was doing with the company behind your back. You were much easier to control than Howard, so thanks for that. It was a little frustrating to have to redirect a man child, but easier than dealing with an actual genius who’d bothered to grow up and have principles.”

“I… I am in, Sir.” APOLLO sounded terrified at his own brilliance. That was a feeling Tony knew all too well.

“Get me everything, Paul. I want these servers clear. J make sure we don’t leave behind any traces for the crazies to find and keep the engineers on this train wreck from having anything to run off with.”

“On it, Sir.”

“Yes, Sir.” Both AIs agreed to their separate tasks.

Stane had been ranting while Tony was otherwise occupied, and with Jarvis’ warning in his ear, Tony could see that Stane was trying to taunt him to come within reach. The suit’s targeting system could pick up the hundreds of tiny cords attached to the hefty armor that were making it function. Stane needed the arc reactor in Tony’s chest – the one attached to his suit instead of Tony’s innards, thanks to Jarvis. Stane couldn’t come up and get it, so he needed Tony to come down and give him a shot. If Tony hit Stane’s suit with enough velocity, he’d rip the abomination off the cords and smash him right through the wall, but Stane would probably bear hug Tony and hope that whatever battery pack the others had worked into his armor would keep him moving just long enough to hold Tony down with his weight and yank the arc reactor from his chest. It seemed insanely risky to Tony, which meant Stane had a backup plan. That thought made Tony break into cold sweats and run through flight trajectories in his head.

“We have everything, Sir.” APOLLO said with a sigh of relief.

“Great. Then shut this shit down.” APOLLO went after the other tech with a sizzle, bless his bloodthirsty little heart.

“And the other armor, Sir?” JARVIS asked.

“Fry the power cords.”

The computers started sparking just in time for Stane to realize that twisting to look was the same as driving without power steering. “What the—”

Tony nudged open the window and came down, hovering outside of the other suit’s massive range. “At least my suit doesn’t have to be plugged into an outlet to work.”

“Until I get the arc reactor that’s glowing in your chest, Tony. Once I’ve got that, there’s nothing the US Military won’t do or forgive.”

“That was the big plan? Steal the arc reactor?”

“That’s still the plan, Tones.”

Whatever Stane was about to do, Tony shot first. An arc reactor repulsor blast straight to his chest sent Stane crashing through the wall like a broken toy. It was much more satisfying when Tony wasn’t crashing with him.

Tony didn’t put in the effort to make sure Stane was clear before he started firing off tiny rockets into the structural support beams for Section 16 and went straight up, taking it all down around his ears as he flew clear. He’d let the government agents try and recover anything from the debris only to find out everything had been wiped. Tony hovered there for a moment, looking down at the perfect destruction he’d left in his wake, the arc reactor’s section of the building untouched but missing a wall.

He had a moment of pleasure that his math had been right before he got distracted by the shouts of FBI agents swarming around the other armor, guns drawn and demanding Stane raise his hands. Stane did so with the cock in his wrist that Tony was about 80% certain meant gunfire. He zipped down and finally got his satisfying crash, landing with one knee on the ground and one fist straight through the abomination’s chest.

Though he had plenty of clearance between the metal and Stane’s ribs, Stane still shrieked, “Tony!” at him like he thought Tony was trying to kill him.

As one, the FBI agents all flinched the guns away, horror at shooting Tony Stark overcoming their training. Tony was pretty sure Stane had figured out one last way to fuck him over before he went into custody, but then APOLLO’s avatar appeared at the bottom of Tony’s screen and when he opened his mouth to snort, “I’m not Tony Stark,” it was APOLLO’s voice that came out.

Agents started shouting things, but Peter raised a hand and shut everyone up, leaving Tony with something like silence as he ripped the faceplate off Stane’s armor. The agents started up again and Tony ignored them to look at Peter.

“Agent Burke, I’m who Mr. Stark said would be able to handle whatever Stane managed to pull out of storage.”

“And what in the world are you?”

“I’m Iron Man.”

There was a long pause. “…What?”

“Don’t worry about it, Agent Burke. You’ve got bigger problems today.”

Peter stepped forward, gun still at the ready despite how useless he knew it had to be against the armor. “That’s Obadiah Stane.”

“Yes. He is in knowing possession of stolen intellectual property from Mr. Stark and is currently attempting to use it for attempted murder.”

“And we’re supposed to believe the man in the suit of flying armor?” Another agent shouted, and based off Peter’s eye roll Tony didn’t think that guy was going to have a shining career.

“The man in the flying suit of armor sent by Mr. Stark to capture Obadiah Stane before he turned the guns on all of you.”

His human face on full display, Stane shouted, “I was just protecting myself from this madman!”

Before he could start spewing too much venom, Iron Man grabbed the abomination by the excess metal around his shoulders and gave Stane a little shake. “Release it.” Stane stuck out his chin. “Now who’s the petulant one? Release it.” A few agents finally found their courage and stepped forward like their guns could be more intimidating than the armor. Iron Man looked at Burke, who told the other agents to hold it.

Iron Man half dragged Stane upright. “You can release it or I can rip it off of you.” And what do you know? Tony could hear the familiar whirring of the armor detaching. Tony may or may not have helped things along since the second-rate engineers who’d built this armor hadn’t embraced the notion of speed in their design. A pajama-clad, fully-human Stane was left standing there when Peter waved forward his agents and told them to Mirandize Stane and take him into custody.

Rather than walk away with the other agents, Peter holstered his weapon and stepped up to Iron Man, staring at him like he could see traces of the human inside. “So, Stark made and sent a vigilante to stop Stane instead of letting my agents handle things like they’re trained to?”

“No one is trained for this.” Iron Man kicked the armor at his feet. “Not yet, at least. No one but me.”

“And are you going to take off your mask and tell me who you are and what Tony was thinking by making your suit?”

“Nope. I don’t answer to you, Agent Burke. I answer to Mr. Stark.”

“I doubt you answer to anyone… Iron Man.”

Tony just knew Peter was going to start lecturing him on the other armor being evidence, but there was shouting. Tony shoved Peter behind him just in time for Stane to wrench himself out of an agent’s grip – middle aged did not mean he wasn’t threatening, hadn’t these kids learned that? – and grab a gun. Before Stane could point it at anyone, Iron Man fired. Or rather, JARVIS fired since his cold logic was the only thing out there that could manage to hit Stane in the thigh rather than shoot him someplace more permanently damaging.

Stane collapsed against the side of the agency car with a howl. The other agents automatically checked their fellows for bullet wounds, and none of them got between Tony and Stane when Iron Man walked over to the man’s crumpled form.

“You going to end me?” Stane growled, not even having the decency for blood to be between his teeth like those soldiers he’d murdered in Afghanistan.

“You’re not worth the blood on my hands, Stane.”

“You know what I did.”

“I do. And you’re going to spend the rest of your life in solitary confinement because if they leave you to yourself, you’re going to end up murdered by some career criminal with a brother in the military who has more ethics than the man who betrayed his godson to terrorists. You’re going to rot in prison. And you know what the best part is? Mr. Stark is still your heir. And if he’s not, there’s no way he loses the civil case to take every asset you have left in the world since you’re never going to get out to touch them. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in the not fun part of Cuba while Tony Stark spends your money.”

Stane just stared up at him. “You always had more mettle than your father.”

“You never knew my father.”

Stane laughed. “That’s what you’re going with, then?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Well then, Iron Man. Show mercy on a man you don’t have any reason to hate.”

“I don’t hate you Stane. I don’t hate creatures this spineless and pathetic.”

“I gambled on the world.”

“And you lost.”

“I did. So will you.”

After all this time and all the blood he’d spilled, Stane still had the power to get to him. Instead of standing there and letting him, Tony turned away. JARVIS’ shout was the only warning Tony had that Stane was lunging for something under the car, but he wasn’t wrapped up in the suit any longer and the FBI shot true.

For all that Tony had seen the bodies of those soldiers who’d died for him, that he’d shot down terrorists, and that Yinsen had died under his hands, Tony had never actually watched someone be shot at close range He hadn’t seen the way their body jostled from the impact, or the blood that died navy pajamas purple, and the puddle that looked obscenely bright under the light of FBI flashlights. It wasn’t like Yinsen, struggling for breath, fighting to offer up last words. Stane was there one moment, and then in a rush of sound JARVIS didn’t quite mute, he was gone.

Tony tracked the random scrap of metal that an FBI agent kicked away from Stane’s hand, no threat to anyone. “How in the hell are we supposed to explain this? You shot him for reaching for a hunk of metal! He can’t testify if he’s dead! And you!” Peter turned all his righteous fury on Iron Man. “You’re coming in to tell us what in the hell is going on here!”

Tony cleared his throat, which neither AI translated for their audience. “Thanks for the offer, Agent Burke, but I have to tell Mr. Stark that Stane pulled suicide by cop.”

“I don’t let vigilantes walk away from me, not even ones approved by Tony Stark.”

“I’m not a vigilante. I’m Stark Industries security.”

“That’s really what you’re going with after getting caught on camera in Gulmira?”

“Retrieving Stark Industries property that had been sold to terrorists.”

Peter rolled his eyes.

“Take the excuse, Agent Burke. I’m above your pay grade and you have enough problems to deal with today. You have to answer for a dead industrialist and domestic terrorist.”

If Tony could’ve raised a snarky eyebrow through the mask he would’ve, but as it was, he just took off into the sky, leaving a fuming but compliant Agent Burke behind him. Well, mostly compliant. JARVIS informed him that about ten seconds after the armor left the ground Tony Stark had a call. Tony didn’t answer. And if he took the long way home, looping over the ocean and giving himself a few minutes over the black water and going far enough out to see the stars, he didn’t think the people at home would mind.


	13. Chapter 13

Jarvis met Tony with a mug of tea and his son. Tony had meant to stay in his lab and get the press statement and business plan ready for release the second CNN called asking what in the hell was going on. Then they, and every other news organization on the planet, could be pacified before they spread panic or damage to stock prices. SI needed to get in front of the story and make it clear that Tony was more than cooperating fully. That would comfort people before they gave in to the cinematic thought that mentally disturbed Tony Stark was the only pathetic thing standing between SI and total collapse. Tony was already thinking about press conferences and the necessity of an on-camera interview when Jarvis shut down that entire train of thought by pushing Tony up the stairs and into bed. Tony’s objections lost all meaning when Jarvis laid Lex down beside him in his pillow circle.

“J—”

“No, Anthony. The world will be at your door soon enough. You have time enough for a bit of sleep before you endure what will be a rather difficult day.”

“Coffee helps with that too, you know.”

“I am certain you will be having enough coffee to kill a lesser man, but sleep is better.” Tony gave his obligatory grumbles, but it was difficult to really summon up discontent when his bed was so damn comfortable and Lex looked like he hadn’t slept a wink himself because Jarvis couldn’t be left to fret on his own. Tony rested a hand on his kid’s stomach and fell asleep to the gentle rise and fall of his belly.

With practice at tracking the state of Tony’s REM cycle from the twitches of his eyelids, JARVIS woke Tony at the optimum moment. While Tony napped, Jarvis had stood a silent sentinel in the living room and refused everyone passage down the hall so Tony could get his necessary rest. Jarvis had foisted off an impatient FBI agent, Miss Potts – who had just taken up residence in the living room where she watched the estimated stock price drop and swore to reporters that Mr. Stark would have a statement for them soon – and Dr. Keyworth. The good doctor watched Pepper, and he watched the news, and he read statements from FBI agents that they shouldn’t have made to reporters  – which Agent Burke left to handle – and he watched Jarvis, and he chatted with JARVIS, and his highly-trained brain put together far more than Edwin would have been comfortable with if he realized.

After his digital counterpart woke Tony, Jarvis did not give Anthony the option of first calling Agent Burke or consulting with Miss Potts. Instead, he handed Anthony coffee, took Lex to the living room for a feeding, and abandoned Anthony find Dr. Keyworth waiting by the windows after he finished his morning ablutions.

Tony just sighed. “I’m not going to lie, I figured J was going to call you before he even sent me to bed this morning.”

“He thought you needed a consult after coordinating the digital end of tracking down Stane and sending SI security after him?” That didn’t sound very believable to Stanley and his tone made it obvious.

“Is that what they’re saying on the news?” Tony dropped into one of the chairs and took in the weak, morning sunshine. He chose not to be frustrated that Stanley looked perfectly chipper in tweed at this forsaken time of day.

“Yup. There are several FBI agents who couldn’t keep their mouths shut and talked to a few different organizations. It’s out that Iron Man is on your payroll and apparently answers directly to you.”

“Are they covering that more than the terrorism?”

“I’d say it depends on the channel, though they might be switching back and forth more than I’m giving them credit for. I’m sure JARVIS could tell you.”

“He’ll have running percentages and Twitter-based opinion reflection models. Pep must be losing her mind.”

“I think she’s had to wrangle other secretaries to help her answer the phone calls and just repeat over and over again that Stark Industries has no official comment at this time but they will soon.”

“I had an official statement drafted.”

“Mr. Jarvis told me that your statement was ready for Stane and his activities, not for Iron Man. Neither he nor Pepper had any idea how you wanted to handle that information. And just FYI, Pepper seems pretty ticked that she didn’t even know it was information.”

“Can’t I just claim the agents were full of shit?” Tony sighed and flopped his head back against the cushion, wishing he was still in bed.

“That seems counter-productive since you’re going to be sending Iron Man off to collect your weapons and shut down terrorist organizations that have been profiteering off your tech.”

“Why must you be so practical?”

“Because if I’m practical about that, then maybe you’ll listen to me when I ask what you’re going to do about Iron Man.”

“Own it and get the lawyers to find out how we get around being sued for vigilante problems. I’m pretty sure it’s enough to say he’s reclaiming stolen property for most of the shit Iron Man is going to get up to, but the shooting people is going to get legally hairy.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of wanting to know what your plan is to keep people from realizing that  _you’re_  Iron Man.”

Sheer force of will kept Tony from freezing. “I suppose in the way that all creators are part of their creations, I’m Iron Man.”

“Yeah, I was referring more to you being the guy who flew the suit to Afghanistan, took out a terrorist cell, stopped Stane last night, and somehow managed to convince trained FBI agents that you weren’t yourself.”

Tony rolled his head forward and met Stanley with the same bland stare he used on reporters. “What makes you think I was piloting the suit?”

“Because whatever hacking you had to do wouldn’t have required a nap. Not for you. But flying a metal suit to arrest your godfather? That absolutely would.” Tony didn’t answer. “This really isn’t what I meant about creating order from the chaos, but I should have guessed that you would go above and beyond the bounds of what anyone else would deem possible.”

“You have any ideas on the secret identity front?”

If Stanley was surprised by the trust, he didn’t show it. “Do you have anyone else who can pilot the suit?”

“J, can you manage it?”

“Standard flight patterns and such, Sir, but I do not believe I could be capable of taking it into battle.”

“Battle shouldn’t be necessary. I’m just thinking that when you have your obligatory press conference today that you might want Iron Man make an appearance if you need him to. Though, with all due respect JARVIS, I’d refrain from talking.”

“Sir assumed a voice modulator last night when dealing the FBI.”

“That’s good, but unless you can replicate the speech pattern Tony employed last night while you’re using that modulator, I’d keep my mouth shut. The same voice with a different pattern will be a red flag to any analyst watching the situation.”

“The FBI agents are the only ones who heard me talk.”

“Maybe, but you can bet that the FBI and CIA’s profilers have already sat them down and made each agent repeat what Iron Man said to the best of their recollection so they can begin constructing a profile.”

“You think I should have a fake identity for the Iron Man.”

“Honestly, if you’re going to do this, I think you should  _do_  this.”

“You think I should be known as Iron Man?”

“Hell, no. The last thing you need is to get pulled in the hundred different directions that will come with being an obvious superhero. I think you should construct a fake  _person_  to pilot the suit, not just a personality. Different voice, different speech patterns, different psychology, different combat history, create a whole person and run a program to filter that personality through whenever you’re in the suit. And then I think you should build an entire roster of backup pilots.”

“What?” Tony straightened.

“As a therapist I would not be able, in good conscience, to recommend you putting just one person in that suit all the time. Your best friend is in the Air Force, hasn’t he lectured you about the physical and psychological precautions they take to keep anything from happening to the pilots?”

“How do you know about those?”

“I specialize in PTSD, Tony. I’m  _part_ of those precautions.”

“So, you think…”

“Have your fake Iron Man in the wings if you need him for the press conference today, just to get things back under control and buy you more time, but keep him out if you can. Once you’ve survived that, start constructing a big, beautiful lie to pacify all the worries people might end up having before they even think to have them. Get everyone on Iron Man’s side before they realize disagreement is an option. Control the chaos of public opinion and shut down a bunch of future difficulties.”

“My therapist is encouraging me to lie. I don’t really know what to do with that.”

“I’m  _your_  therapist, Tony.” Stanley leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “If you leave this issue for later instead of handling it now, you’re going to end up drowning for who knows how long. Then you’ll spiral. Creating this order for Iron Man is pretty much the same thing as other people laying out their clothes for tomorrow before going to bed, or doing homework when they get home from school on a Friday.”

“Constructing a false identity for my suit is the same as not procrastinating homework?”

“Identity, personality, training schedule, flight roster, batting order; the whole plan is like other people making a study schedule for the semester.”

“Right.” Tony popped up. “J, let me know when you and Stanley get the identity basics figured out and you’ve got enough to sell it in case I have to drag Iron Man into the press conference with me. You don’t have a lot of time but Pep will schedule the conference as soon as you’re good to go.”

Tony was out the door before Stanley could do more than shout. “I didn’t agree to that!”

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” Tony called over his shoulder and made for the living room with a cackle.

Tony had planned on dealing with a scolding from Pepper first, but as much as he would be amused to do so otherwise, one didn’t really ignore FBI agents pacing around their living room. “‘sup buttercup?”

“Oh, how I wish he was talking to you.” Peter sighed at Pepper. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going to be mainlining coffee to make it through the day, but that’s not really different than after any other late-night tech session. What’s up?”

“What’s up? Tony, have you not seen the news?”

Tony went to the kitchen for the aforementioned coffee. “I know that your agents leak like an old gasket so the entire world knows that Iron Man is an SI employee.” Jarvis plucked the coffee mug from Tony’s hand and replaced it with a smoothie glass.

“Yeah, so why aren’t you freaking out more about that?”

“Because this might be even better release timing then what I planned. It’s hard to blame a guy for creating a flying metal suit the same day you find out he’s been dealing with domestic terrorists.” Lex was in his Bumbo chair atop the counter, fat little legs sticking out while he gnawed on something that might have once been a graham cracker. Tony pressed the cold glass to Lex’s feet and the boy squawked at having his breakfast interrupted.

“A little advanced notice on the issue of Iron Man would have been appreciated, Mr. Stark.”

“I wasn’t planning on pulling him out last night, Miss Potts.”

“Just sending him overseas to fight terrorists.”

Tony nodded. “Point. Though we’re probably venturing into territory that we shouldn’t be discussing unless Peter is willing to sign that employment contract with SI that I’ve got for him.”

“Not today.”

Tony straightened away from the counter and stopped teasing his son. “That’s not a no.”

“It’s a no. I need to talk to Iron Man.”

“Ask the SI lawyers and they’ll schedule something.”

“He’s a witness to a crime, Tony. We have no idea what went on inside the SI building, just that Stane came flying out and chunks of the building came down around Iron Man’s ears.”

“I can tell you that Iron Man chose to take down Section 16 to destroy all the technology that had been bastardized off my own because it was the best way to keep it out of anyone else’s hands. As for what happened in the conversation between them beforehand, Iron Man has a right to speak with his attorney before he speaks to you.”

Peter just stared at Tony like this was a version of the man he’d never before. And really, it was. Peter had met Tony Stark scientist, salesman, lover, and friend, but never Stark Industries’ President. “What happened to everything I’ve been hearing on the news about how, ‘Tony Stark and Stark Industries are determined to help the FBI in whatever way possible?’”

A mouthful of smoothie was not nearly as satisfying as a shot. “Tell me, where’d you get all the information you used to arrest people, Petey-pie?”

Peter closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m sorry, Tony. That was unfair.” And there was the lack of reckless pride that made him like Peter. “But Tony, we need to talk to him.”

“And I’ll get him in front of you as soon as I can, but the pilot didn’t think he was going to be in the public eye this soon. He’s got a life that he needs to protect and I’m not going to let him jeopardize it any more than I’ve already asked him to. He didn’t sign up for picking a fight with another suit in the middle of Los Angeles, but it needed to be done, so he did it. I’m going to get him a lawyer before he talks to the Feds so his desire to help doesn’t lead him to accidentally admit that he broke some laws when he took out Stane.” So long as Tony cordoned off the part of his brain where Iron Man was him, it was easy to act in his best interests. That he was more aggressive for the rights of this non-existent person then he would’ve been for his own was something Tony didn’t want to think about but Stanley was no doubt going to smack him with at the first opportunity.

Tony really wasn’t looking forward to that, but Peter recognized his stress and stepped forward to put his hands on Tony’s shoulders. “This pilot of yours sounds like a good friend, Tony.”

“I think he might be. You gonna be my good friend too?” Tony smirked.

Peter snorted. “Try your pitch again after the SI board are all serving their sentences.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that. Do you think your wife would like to sell her business and start handling event planning for the Maria Stark Foundation?”

Peter just rolled his eyes. “Goodbye, Tony.”

“See you soon, Petey-pie.”

“Oh!” Peter stopped before he made it to the door and slowly turned like he’d been happy to forget what else he needed to say until just this moment, and would have been happy to forget until he was in his car. “Did Iron Man tell you about how Stane died?”

“I got the particulars, yes.” Which was not vague enough to quell the flinches from Pepper and Jarvis, which meant JARVIS had told them both. (Though Pepper probably hadn’t gotten the video playback like Jarvis.)

“So, you know…”

“Suicide by cop.”

“Not as much as we thought.”

Tony slouched against the counter. “What did he have on him?”

“At the time, we thought he was just reaching for a hunk of metal that had come off the suit, but it was an actual device. Your guys told us it was a…” Peter took his notebook out of his pocket and checked. “A sonic taser.”

Tony closed his eyes. “Fuck.”

“Apparently it causes short-term paralysis and the US Military refused production because of the, and I quote, ‘overwhelming potential for abuse’.”

“Stane had that on him.”

“We believe it was in his hand outside the armor, probably because he didn’t think it would work from inside the armor.”

“Given what they made his armor out of, even if it did work, the range would be so dramatically cut that you’d have to be within three feet for it to work.”

“And I assume that going through the Iron Monger armor meant it wouldn’t be able to make it through the Iron Man armor too.”

“Iron Monger?”

“That’s what the press are calling it.”

Tony buried his face in his hands with a groan.

“Hey, they had to call it something other than, ‘Not Iron Man’”.

“I’d rather it went unnamed, but I get the impulse. So that was Stane’s plan then? I couldn’t figure out why he went for his armor instead of just taking off and borrowing someone’s plane. But if he was trying to lure everyone in…”

“Still not the world’s best plan since he’d be a fugitive.”

“He’d have his armor and Iron Man’s. That would be enough bargaining power to make pretty much anything go away.”

“Your faith in the justice system is heartwarming.”

“If you want to retain your faith, I’d leave before I drag you down to my jaded level.”

Peter laughed, but raised his hands and forfeited the field. He left with goodbyes to everyone. There was one person left to be grilled by before Tony could move forward for the day. “So, Pep—”

“Don’t insult either one of us by pretending like you weren’t in the suit last night, Tony.” Tony blinked in surprise, less at the knowledge and more at the tone. “You have a rug in that sitting room to cover up the massive hole in the floor.” Pepper pointed to the new addition taking the place of the deceased piano, and politely ignored the patch job on the roof that wouldn’t stand up to any actual weather.

“Ah.”

“Did you think I wasn’t going to notice a new, random rug?”

“I was hoping you’d think it was for the kid.”

“It’s  _Persian_. You don’t put babies and their toys on a Persian rug.”

“I might.”

“Jarvis wouldn’t. What were you thinking!”

“That I’m still twitchy about having repair guys—”

“This isn’t about the floor! Or the ceiling! Or the fact that you either fell through or shot through both of them to make those holes! You flew around the world and attacked a terrorist camp, Tony!”

“I feel that specificity is important in this situation. Because I didn’t shoot up a terrorist  _camp_. They were using my weapons to shoot up a town.”

“Now you’re going to fly off to the Middle East every time terrorists start shooting at people? You’ll never sleep.”

“No, Jarvis has already given me that lecture.”

“Apparently not very well because then you flew off to fight with Stane!”

“That was just to Los Angeles.”

“Tony!”

“I admit, Pep, I was a little reckless about this stuff, but I’m getting better. Stanley is back there with JARVIS creating a whole Iron Man pilot  _program_  for layers of security, and I’ve got a system tracking down my weapons and the terrorists using them so I’m not just leaping into the dark every time and hoping I hit something. I can’t rely on reporters to keep telling me where to go, or to wait until they start shooting people and then fly out to confront them. I’m making a plan.”

“A plan that involves you flying a metal suit around the world and getting shot at.”

“A plan that involves me cleaning up the mess I made.”

Pepper gathered up her paperwork with a huff. “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“Only if you want it to be, Ms. Potts.”

Pepper turned on her impressive heels and squared her shoulders. “I’ve never shirked work before, Mr. Stark, I’m not going to start now.”

“Well then, you want to help Stanley fabricate a superhero?”

Pepper was too classy a lady to bite her lip, but Tony knew what she looked like when she was fighting back a smile.


	14. Chapter 14

The seven of them settled in the living room and came up with a game plan. (The four adults, plus Lex because it was all for him, JARVIS who was doing all the real work, and APOLLO because even though he didn’t talk, he sent Tony updates on his pad.)

Tony had been hoping for just enough of a plan get him through the day and keep him from saying anything at the press conference that he wouldn’t be able to stick to later. But between the lot of them, they had the next month laid out in unnerving detail and responses to half a dozen unexpected variations so they wouldn’t be scrambling to fix future problems. Which meant Tony had no excuse for putting off the press conference. They gave him just enough time to shower, shave, put on one of his more impressive suits, and drive to SI to greet to hoard of reporters who’d only been called by Pepper 45 minutes ago. (He was pretty sure half of them had just been waiting outside the building for something to happen.)

Tony braced before the door, reminding himself that Jarvis and Lex were home with Stanley, probably discussing their battle plan for Tony’s mental health over tea and those stupid little puffs that Lex kept squishing in his fist before he actually got them in his mouth. Tony conjured up the memory of Lex sticking out his hand to have Jarvis wipe it clean before he tried again – because the first major way Tony’s kid wasn’t a thing like him was that he hated getting dirty. Jarvis did it every time without complaint, somehow managing to keep any gunk off his pressed cuffs. Tony inserted Stanley into the memory. He’d probably watch the dance twice before he recommending – like Tony had – that Lex could deal with being a little dirty. Jarvis would give Stanley the same glower he’d given Tony, and Tony kind of hoped this daydream turned into reality because he wanted to watch a battle of the stare downs between Jarvis and Stanley.

Tony held on to that mental image while he swanned onto the little stage without waiting for an introduction. Tony had expected flashbacks to his last press conference, but instead his head decided to abandon the image of his kid and instead translate the ravenous wall of sound into chopper blades. He stood behind the podium and let reporters shout at him for longer than he would have under any other circumstances, just sticking his hands in his pockets and breathing like Stanley had taught. Tony’s devious little therapist had stuck an ice pack in his pocket on the way out the door, and the sudden shock of cold against his palm was enough to jolt Tony’s mind out of the desert.

Thankfully, Tony came back to himself about the same time expectant silence fell over the reporters. As a man who’d managed to present papers despite being completely wasted, it wasn’t difficult to pretend like his silence had been planned instead of the product of staving off a panic attack. Tony let the silence hang for a moment before he raised an eyebrow and said, “I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t think that would work on you guys.”

The shouting immediately started up again, and Tony waved his hands to calm them. “I can’t talk if you guys don’t quiet down.”

“Mr. Stark!” One voice from the front row rang out above the others. “What happened this morning, Mr. Stark!”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you guys.” The only sound left was the flashing of cameras. “I’m going to make a statement and then I’ll answer some questions. Think we can all manage to be quiet long enough for that?” The reporters grumbled and Tony didn’t have to look to know Pepper was glowering at him for antagonizing the press.

“As I’m sure you’re all aware, at 3:14 this morning the FBI began conducting raids on the homes of several members of the Stark Industries Board of Directors. Of the ten sitting members of the Board, seven of them were taken into custody and had their assets seized, while four prior members of the Board were subjected to the same. Two current Board members have been brought in for questioning, and the last one is giving you people a press conference.”

Shouts of “Mr. Stark!” started up again.

“I’m not done yet.” Tony called. “I cannot speak to specific charges being brought against any of the Board Members, current or former. If you want more information about that you’re going to have to go back to the FBI agents you got to leak in the first place and get more from them.

“I can speak to Stark Industries, however. Both SI and myself have done and will continue to do everything in our power to support the FBI in their pursuit of justice. Other than proprietary technology and privacy concerns of our employees, I have opened Stark Industries’ servers and financial accounts to the FBI for whatever information they need.” Shocked murmurs rippled through the room. “SI’s lawyers will be available to our employees to help them protect their own privacy concerns, but other than that, I am releasing a memo to all employees asking them to help the FBI to the fullest extent of their ability. It should be in everyone’s inbox by the end of this press conference, so you won’t have trouble tracking down a copy.

“Let me make myself absolutely clear:” Tony braced his hands on the podium and leaned into it, “whatever fines or charges are levied, domestic or international, Stark Industries will meet them. Stark Industries has more to offer this world than chaos and destruction, and we will go forward with that purpose. It is my intention to create a trust to help rebuild what the Board of this company helped destroy. Any monies gained from my personal and Stark Industries’ civil suits against the former members of the Board will be put towards furthering education, building houses, spreading technology, sharing medicine, and whatever other things are necessary to bring some measure of comfort and justice for the people who have been victims of the Board’s crimes. As soon as we understand the extent of the damage done, Stark Industries will begin repairing it. Now, questions.”

Tony peeled his hands off the podium and stuck them back in his pockets to deal with the torrent of noise. One lady was all but falling over the people in the front row to shout at him, so Tony nodded at her first before someone got a broken nose. “Mr. Stark, why did you wait so long to make a statement?”

“Because I was more concerned with making sure the FBI got everything they needed than with talking to you people.”

“Mr. Stark! Is that a confirmation that you were aiding the FBI in their raids on the SI Board Members?”

“That makes it sound like I was roaming around in a tac vest. I locked down the SI servers and associated bank accounts when the FBI started their raids.”

“Is that all you did, Mr. Stark?”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “That’s not enough?”

Some of the reporters laughed and tension leaked out of the room. There was some small measure of comfort that even jaded reporters were a little nervous about questioning Tony on the current hell of his company. That was bad enough, but Pepper had warned him in the car ride over that the FBI leakers had also shared that Stane had been the one to sell Tony out. JARVIS said the video hadn’t made it onto the Internet yet and they were vague on the content, but everyone knew Stane was dead and he’d sold Tony to terrorists. It was a hell of a day, but the reporters breathed easy that they could expect Tony to still be Tony.

“What I meant, Mr. Stark:” the reporter doubled down and shouted over their laughing fellows, “is it true that you provided the FBI with the information necessary to arrest your fellow Board members?”

The room went quiet. Apparently, that wasn’t common knowledge yet. “You asking me if I was the whistle blower?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tony gripped the ice pack and braced himself. “Yup, I was.”

The room exploded. It was like getting hit with a baseball bat and Tony leaned back and blinked at the force of it. There was no real clear voice among the scrum, but in between the melee Tony could pick out a general gist of wanting to know how Tony found out.

“When I was in Afghanistan—” and hey, starting a sentence like that cut off all noise. “Thank you. The terrorists who held me captive had Stark Industries weapons. That’s why they kept me alive: to build them more. When I got home, one of the first things I did was investigate how my weapons got into the hands of terrorists. SI prided itself on selling only to the US military and our allies. None of those approved organizations had reported any of their weapons being stolen, which meant someone had been dealing my weapons under the table. That search led me to Obadiah Stane, and Stane led to everyone else.”

There was a moment of silence before a seasoned reporter from the Washington Post summoned up the gumption to ask, “Mr. Stark, we’ve been hearing reports that the FBI has a video from the Ten Rings terrorist cell attempting to blackmail Mr. Stane for money to kill you. Can you confirm the existence of this video?”

“It wasn’t blackmail.”

“Mr. Stark?”

“Obadiah Stane paid the Ten Rings $500,000.00 to attack a US Military convoy. He withheld from the Ten Rings that  _I_ would be a part of that convoy. When the local commander of the Ten Rings realized I was there, he kidnapped me and tried to shake Stane down for more money. Wanting fair market value for a murder isn’t the same thing as blackmail.”

Most of the reporters gave that a respectful moment of silence, but there was a familiar blonde in the front row who decided Tony’s vulnerability meant it was time to go for the jugular. “Why did Mr. Stane turn on you?”

“Seriously?” Tony gestured at the lobby of Stark Industries.

“What about Iron Man?” A boy shouted. And seriously, that one looked like a puppy.

“What about him?”

“FBI agents have stated off the record that the same suit of armor that attacked the Ten Rings in Gulmira was the one who apprehended Stane, and that Stane was in a similar suit of armor when he was apprehended.”

“It’s my understanding that if it was off record it didn’t happen.”

“Mr. Stark!” And Tony really didn’t know how the reporter could shout and sigh at the same time. Jarvis should learn that. (No, Tony took that back. Jarvis should never,  _ever_ learn such a thing.)

“The FBI has given their official statement about this morning and I’m not going to go into more detail until they give the go ahead.”  There was a whole mess of shouting. “However!” The reporters quieted down and Tony had new sympathy for his old school teachers. “I will state that Iron Man is an employee of Stark Industries. And no,” he cut them off, “you don’t get to meet him today.” Tony took a gamble that the conversation was going to stay off vigilantism. “I had no idea that Stane had managed to steal plans for the Iron Man armor, or that any of my employees would be such idiots as to help him create it without asking any questions about where the designs came from.”

“Meaning what?” Someone shouted.

“Meaning that Iron Man has the day off.”

“I meant about the scientists, Mr. Stark.”

“I already said I wasn’t going to tell you more than the FBI has.” Which was a nice little confirmation that the FBI was pressing charges on the engineers for their stupidity.

“Where did Iron Man come from, Mr. Stark?”

Tony furrowed. “Me?”

The reporter rolled their eyes. “The point of the armor, Mr. Stark.”

“Ah, I designed the Iron Man armor with the intention to conduct weapons retrieval since the first step in cleaning up any mess is to stop making new ones.”

“And who taught you that?” someone taunted from the back.

“My butler.” Tony smirked. “Who else?” The reporters laughed.

“Mr. Stark!” Tony nodded at this one for having the decency not to just shout a question at him. “Why did weapons retrieval turn into a gunfight at Gulmira?”

“Because Iron Man got there and, what do you know, there turned out to be terrorists killing people.” He shrugged.

“Follow up,” the reporter shouted over someone trying to turn them back to SI. “What weapons was Iron Man ‘retrieving’ from SI when he confronted Obadiah Stane this morning?”

“The suit that you guys are calling the Iron Monger. I discovered its existence while shutting down the SI servers this morning, but not before Stane was wearing it and preparing to attack FBI agents. Iron Man intervened to protect the agents and the people of Los Angeles.”

“Do you intend to continue to use Iron Man in situations where terrorists just  _happen_  to be killing people?” Another guy shouted.

Tony looked the man dead in the eye and then caught the camera that would give everyone at home the clearest view of his resolve. “I intend to clean up my mess.”

The reporters started shouting again, but the familiar blonde in the front row popped to her feet and apparently had enough street cred that the people calmed to let her question get out loud and clear. “You’ve been the head of Stark Industries for over a decade. Why would Mr. Stane try and kill you for it now?”

Tony… had no fucking idea. Not a clue. Pepper had nothing, neither Jarvis nor JARVIS could make sense of it, APOLLO hadn’t found anything in Stane’s paperwork, and for all Stanley’s brilliance in this area he could only make guesses. It was like one morning Stane had woken up and decided, ‘I think I’ll kill my godson today.’

“Oh, a couple of reasons.” Tony hadn’t quite planned on taking things this direction, but he wasn’t the sort of man to pass up an opportunity.

“Feel like sharing?”

“Not really, but you guys will just follow me around until I do.” Pause for laughter. “Stane might have gotten a little murderous because I was talking about moving SI away from weapons manufacturing.”

“Before your kidnapping, Mr. Stark?” A young reporter called out for clarification.

“Before. I’d been doing some casual engineering on other projects, though this probably isn’t the press conference to release a line of phones and tablets so check in with me about that later. Looking back,” Tony put his hands in his pockets and gripped the ice pack while he stared off in the distance like he was having to mull on this one, “what probably made Stane  _really_  murderous is that he wasn’t my heir anymore.”

You could’ve heard a pin drop. Even the photographers stopped for a moment to make sure they’d heard that right.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Stane was my godfather. I trusted him like almost no one on earth. So like a good godson, I told him when I was putting it down on paper that if I should die, Stark Industries would no longer pass free and clear to him. He’d still be regent like he was with me, but he’d no longer inherit the company.”

The crowd was a mix of “Are you saying—” and “Mr. Stark, who else would inherit?” pretty evenly divided on gender lines, but no one got out an actual question.

“See,” Tony came out from behind the podium and leaned against it, a composed version of the slump he’d donned when he came back from Afghanistan. “I thought my godfather would be happy for me. I thought when he encouraged me to go and hobnob with the military brass in Afghanistan, he was buying me some cushion so they wouldn’t worry about not seeing me for a few months. About once a year is pretty much all those guys can stand me anyway. And I thought that of all people, after all he’d seen, Obadiah Stane would understand why I didn’t want to pass a legacy of blood and death on to my son.”

And the crowd went wild.


End file.
